


A stands for...

by ErzaWritesThings



Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Accidental overdose, Blood, Death, Dimorphodon - Freeform, Disabled Character, Drug Addiction, Gore, Velociraptors, don't worry guys, flying menaces, for once, injuries, primitive weaponry (spears!), raptors are cool, she does end up pretty fucked up tho, the main character doesn't die in this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-08
Updated: 2017-08-12
Packaged: 2018-11-29 09:31:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11438031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErzaWritesThings/pseuds/ErzaWritesThings
Summary: She woke under a crushing weight, the taste of blood thick on her tongue and agony screaming through her whole body. It was dark and silent, and it was hard to move. Her head hurt. Why did her head hurt?In which a little girl gets stuck on Isla Nublar post-movie, and has to figure things out from there. It doesn't go very well.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My first chaptered story on this site! Let's hope it takes off, shall we? I'm having fun writing it, at least, so that's something.
> 
> Anyway, let's get started!
> 
> Warning; this chapter has descriptions of injuries (including broken bones), amnesia and illness. If any of this is triggering, don't read, because this isn't for you.

She woke under a crushing weight, the taste of blood thick on her tongue and agony screaming through her whole body. It was dark and silent, and it was hard to move. When she opened her eyes, it became less dark, but her vision was obscured and tinted an odd shade of blurry red.

Her head hurt.

Why did her head hurt? She blinked, and then winced when it made her head hurt worse. Her vision was still off. She tried to move her arm so she could wipe at her eyes, and keened in pain and frustration when it wouldn’t budge, a heavy weight pinning her wrist. She tried again, sobbing raggedly when she wrenched her hand loose with the grate of stone on stone and the wet sound of blood dripping. Her wrist hurt too, almost more than her head. She stubbornly wiped at her eyes anyway, and her hand came away with more blood than before. She wasn’t sure whether it came from the deep, jagged cuts on her hand and forearm, or from the steady rivulets she could feel drizzling down from her hairline.

God, why did her head hurt so much?

For a moment, she laid still, panting with pain and exhaustion and fear, and then she forced herself to wriggle towards the brighter bit in her field of vision. A kind of raw, slicing agony like she had never felt before shot through her leg, rendering her breathless with its intensity. She struggled for air, lungs suddenly on fire. Black spots danced hypnotically in front of her eyes. They steadily increased in size. Her head gave a particularly vicious throb.

For a moment, she was sure she saw white sparkles, and then she only saw black.

* * *

 

When she struggled back into consciousness, it was darker than before. The only sounds she could make out was the buzz of mosquitoes. Her wrist and her leg felt like they were on fire and about to fall off at the same time. Moving sounded like the hardest thing she had ever done.

Why wouldn’t her head stop hurting?

* * *

 

She woke for a third time a long, long while later.

Blood and tears had crusted her lashes together, and it took a few seconds before she was able to open her eyes. It was lighter now, and the bright spot she had tried to move to earlier was bright enough to send white-hot lances of agony into her eyes. Her mouth tasted like something died inside of it, like old blood and dirt. Her wrist and leg had settled into a steady, bone deep ache that was somehow scarier than the sharp, acute pains from earlier. She didn’t dare glance at her hand to see how bad it was.

The weight on top of her had not diminished, and she was starting to notice how hard it was to breathe when her ribcage was compressed like this. It made her all the more determined to reach the bright spot. Reaching out with her hand, and ignoring the disturbing way in which her wrist was swollen and coloured purple, the cuts already starting to ooze, she dragged herself forward with bullheaded determination.

The pain that tore through her leg and her other arm when it was wrenched loose from wherever it had been stuck was indescribable. She almost bit through her tongue, and the long, guttural noise of agony she made actually hurt her throat. Nevertheless, she swallowed a mouthful of coppery blood and wormed her other arm past her torso so she could pull herself forward with both hands.

Getting towards the bright spot took what felt like hours, and she was pretty sure she blacked out several times. For a long time, all she knew were intermittent periods of pain and bright, and numb darkness. She liked the darkness better. Her head was starting to hurt again.

She continued to claw herself to freedom, stubbornly struggling past the pain.

* * *

 

What seemed like another couple of hours later, she managed to push a piece of debris aside and tumbled into sunlight and fresh air. For the first time in far too long, her lungs had the space to expand properly, and the first full gulp of air had her sobbing with relief at the ease of it. It felt so, so good to breathe freely. To taste fresh air instead of dust and blood.

For a few minutes, she lay prone on the pile of debris she had just crawled out of, just breathing as deeply as she could and enjoying the sunshine. Then, once she’d caught her breath and her eyes had adjusted to the light, she struggled until she was sat upright and finally took a long look at her arms and leg. They were the worst injuries she had ever suffered in her short life. Her left wrist was swollen purple and blue, deep, jagged cuts separating puffed up skin, at some spots even deep enough to show flashes of white bone. Her right lower arm was not much better, though the cuts were not quite as deep. She glanced at her right leg, and felt tears well in her eyes. Near her ankle, there was an odd, unnatural bend. It was swollen enough to make her formerly loose pants tight. On her thigh, above her knee, was a long, deep cut that reached all the way up to her hip. The injuries were clotted and filled with dirt and grit and bits of gravel.

Back to taking deep breaths, this time to calm herself down, she looked around. It was carnage. Crumbled buildings, puddles of blood all over the place, bodies, already starting to decompose, strewn around carelessly. The worst? It was all completely unfamiliar to her.

Somewhere, deep down, she had the niggling feeling that she really should have recognized this place, even if it was trashed. Why didn’t this look as familiar as it felt? And why did her head hurt again? And why, for that matter, was it so hard to remember her name? She looked around, mind blank, and tried to remember her name, or something else, anything at all would do, no matter how small. After long, long minutes, all she could come up with was the letter ‘A’.

A.

Was that her name? It was a bit shorter than she had thought names were supposed to be.

A.

She thought it over for a bit more, but nothing else came to her. A. Maybe there was a… Y? No, she didn’t think she had a Y. An I? That didn’t really sound right either. She tested it a couple of times, placing the I in front of her A, and then behind it, but it just didn’t fit. She didn’t know why, it just didn’t.

After a while, she gave up, deciding to stick with just ‘A’ for now. She returned her attention to her injuries. A wasn’t sure how old she was, but she did know she was old enough to realize her leg should not bend that way. But she didn’t know how to fix it. She couldn’t remember ever having broken something before. She didn’t know how to deal with this. Maybe she could fix it if she got the bone straightened out? A stared at the unnatural crick in her leg and wondered how she was supposed to straighten it out. She was pretty sure that just yanking at it would land her in a world of pain. A did not like pain. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to straighten out her leg. It would probably hurt a lot. But she couldn’t exactly leave her leg as it was, now could she? Something had to be done.

Steeling herself, A forced her hands into motion, which already hurt quite a bit, and then made herself grab her ankle and wrench at it. The pain was indescribable. She yanked her hands away as if they were on fire, unable to stop the screams building in her throat as she withered in agony. When she finally managed to stop screaming, she just sobbed raggedly for long moments. Her leg felt like someone was hacking at it with an axe. She convinced herself to glance at her ankle. It still wasn’t straight.

Biting the inside of her cheek until she could taste blood, A tried again.

She passed out halfway through her third try.

* * *

 

It was night when she regained consciousness. It was cold, too. The debris around her did little to shield A from the wind. She was only wearing jeans and a thin shirt, too, her shoes having been lost when she’d fought her way out of the mound of crumbled building. She wasn’t sure if she had a jacket, but she wasn’t wearing one, so probably not.

A rolled onto her back and chanced a glance at her leg. It didn’t look any better, still cut up and swollen and shattered, but the unnatural bend was mostly taken care of. There was still a bit of an odd crick in it, but it was nowhere as bad as it had been earlier. Next she shifted her attention to her arms. Her left wrist was not much better off than her leg. In fact, it seemed to have gotten a little worse. The swollen, bruised skin radiated heat, and her nose told A that it was starting to get infected. There were hints of too-raw redness, too, and a thick, viscous but colourless stuff was starting to ooze from the cuts. Her right lower arm was in pretty much the same condition, only without the broken wrist. At least her headache had lessened. That was something, right?

Her stomach suddenly gave a ferocious growl. A placed her hands against her tummy, grimacing when hunger reared its ugly head. She looked around, hoping to spot something she could eat. Apart from bodies starting to rot, there was nothing as far as she could see. Her eyes fell on the other buildings. Most were damaged, but still standing. Maybe there would be food in there.

A attempted to stand, and immediately crumbled back down when her leg refused to support her weight. She anxiously scrabbled at her ankle and was relieved to see the slight crick hadn’t worsened again. It hurt like all hell, but at least it was still in the same position she had painstakingly forced it into. Maybe she should see if she could find something to make sure it would remain almost-but-not-quite-straight. But first, food.

With walking obviously not in the cards at the moment, A repeated her earlier technique of just dragging herself towards where she needed to be. It was hell on her arms, and the long cut on her thigh dragged against the ground in a very painful way, nor was it any less painful on her broken leg, but she was too hungry to care. She needed food, and she didn’t care how much it hurt to get it.

The remains of the fourth building she crawled into turned out to be a restaurant, still in relatively decent condition, and A made her way into the kitchen as fast as she was currently capable of. Food had been in the process of being cooked when whatever had happened had happened, leaving chopped vegetables and sliced meats on the counters and the cookers, and when A tried the taps, they gave water no problem.

The veggies were already dried out and starting to go bad, and the meat was raw and didn’t exactly smell fresh anymore, but A was too hungry to care about the condition of the food. She tore into it ravenously, washing down the taste with cold water she had poured from the tap into a large metal mixing bowl, and ate until she was so full it made her nauseous. Then she tore a handful of aprons from a hook near the back entrance of the kitchen, dropped them in a corner, and fell asleep on top of them with the remains of her meal piled next to her, utterly exhausted.

* * *

 

She woke up, hours after her meal, feeling stiflingly hot and freezing cold at the same time, body-shaking shivers racking her spine, sweat dripping down her forehead and her arms and leg absolutely on fire. Her lips were chapped and bleeding, her tongue bone dry and her throat felt like the inside was coated with sand.

She drank desperately from her mixing bowl of water, and then threw it all up again only a few minutes later. She couldn’t produce the saliva needed to chew food and swallow it without choking on the dry chunks, and when she tried to drink more water, her stomach cramped so badly she vomited pink.

She curled up in her aprons in the tiniest ball she could manage, drawing fabric over her shoulders to warm her, and then tossing it aside to cool down and repeating it almost constantly. Her body shook to the point her teeth chattered whenever she closed her mouth. Her face was slick with sweat, and her hair stuck to her forehead, damp and sticky and unbearably hot.

Eventually her mixing bowl was dry and her food torn and scattered around her, but the fever didn’t break and the pain didn’t stop, and A found herself seeing things that weren’t there and calling out for people she no longer knew. There were faces that looked familiar but whose names she couldn’t remember, and the notion of Daddy and Mommy, whose faces she didn’t know anymore, and the vague knowledge of someone called ‘Lex’, of whom she didn’t know what connection they had to her.

The fever rose and the pain was so deep in her bones she didn’t know where it ended anymore, and the images in her head were too bright, too vivid, and she screamed and screamed and screamed until her throat felt raw and she tasted copper and salt in her mouth. She clawed at her eyes and tore bloody gouges into her face, withering until her thigh started to bleed again and her leg cricked worse, and banged her head against the floor to just make it all stop.

Then, when the fever finally broke, she just slumped into her pile of aprons and wailed, deep, ragged sounds from deep in her chest that echoed around the kitchen, sobbed noises so full of pain and anger and fear she made herself cry, and then she cried until she fell asleep out of sheer overwhelming exhaustion and she didn’t wake up for a very long time.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A beats the fever, heals from her wounds, and finds herself a safe place to stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter two, people. Things are going well. A little bit longer than chapter one, but not by much, I'm afraid.
> 
> No real triggers in here, I guess, beyond some mentions of injuries and dead bodies.

A drank deeply from the mixing bowl. Getting the water from the tap had been a doozy, and it had taken her nearly a quarter hour before she’d managed to drag herself across the kitchen to the taps and had filled her trusty bowl. She felt weak as a kitten, her limbs rubbery and unwilling to do as she asked and follow commands, her stomach so sore with hunger she had feared she’d start throwing up blood, her thirst so deep she had been ready to start licking condensation off the tiled walls. She’d already finished a whole mixing bowl of water, and though it made her tummy ache even more, it felt too good to quench her thirst for A to contemplate stopping. A few minutes later, she threw it all up again, the sudden influx of liquid too drastic for her system to handle, but her thirst was gone, and that was what mattered.

That left just the deep, hollow gnaw of starvation in her stomach, and A crawled over to the one of the walk-in coolers as fast as she could and spent several minutes opening it. She jammed an empty crate between the door to keep it open, dragged herself over to the nearest shelf of thankfully cooled and thus still fresh fruits, and proceeded to gorge herself on apples and strawberries and peaches. She yanked a chunk of cheese from a higher shelf and cucumbers and smoked bacon from another, and tore into it without worrying about cutlery or cooking the bacon. She wasn’t sure she knew how to operate a stove anyway.

Once her stomach was full, A pushed over a small crate to empty it, and then filled it with more cheese and cucumbers and bacon, tossed in some fruit as well, and dragged it back to her aprons with some effort.

She slept.

* * *

 

Time passed without A really taking notice of it. She remained in her little corner in the restaurant kitchen until the cuts on her arms and the gash in her thigh began to close after she had painstakingly washed out the dirt and picked out the gravel with a small kitchen knife. They left terrible scars, ones that pulled painfully when she moved too quickly at first, thick and ropey and purple in colour, but they healed.

For long, long weeks, she did nothing but eat, sleep and tend to her wounds, watching like a hawk as her broken wrist and leg began to heal and grow strong again. The crick in her leg didn’t really go away, and it left her with a terrible limp and a dull, persistent ache that became worse whenever she could hear rain pounding on the roof of the restaurant, but after what A believed to be a couple of weeks, she could hobble across the length of the kitchen without too much trouble. She had to relearn to walk properly, with her foot being off like it was, but she shuffled, then walked, and eventually ran without too much trouble.

She washed herself in one of the sinks, ate the food in the walk-in coolers raw, and for a while, the kitchen was her whole world. She didn’t once question why the power was still on to keep the coolers cooling and why the taps ran hot water, the concept of geothermal and solar energy keeping everything running without interference of people so far beyond her comprehension it never even crossed her mind.

Then, when her bones were strong again and her scars were no longer as rigid and painful and the coolers were starting to deplete, A went to find a better place to stay at. She piled the last pieces of food from the coolers into her trusty crate, tough mushrooms she didn’t much like the taste of and sharp onions and things she was pretty sure were called artichoke hearts, and stacked her mixing bowl and aprons on top of it. She had grown fond of her bowl and aprons, and as they were about the only thing she owned, she didn’t want to leave them behind.

A limped over to the doors of the kitchen, the ones that led to the front of the restaurant, and pushed them open with her shoulder. Her nose wrinkled. Outside of her kitchen, it smelled of dust and mildew, rotten food and something that reminded her of death. Her kitchen didn’t exactly smell fresh anymore either, but it didn’t smell like something had died in it.

She tried to ignore the stench and padded out of the front doors, looking around curiously. She remembered little of the place her little restaurant had operated at, and she didn’t know where she was supposed to go. The place was trashed. She had vague memories of being buried under stone and struggling for fresh air, and then finding her kitchen, but most of it was overshadowed with memories of fever and hunger and pain.

A’s memory wasn’t the best these days, to be honest.

Dragging her little crate behind her on a rope she’d made out of an apron ripped to strips, A explored. The bodies she vaguely remembered were little more than skeletons now, only scraps of flesh and cloth left. The stink was enough to turn her stomach, but A pinched her nose and inspected the bones anyway. She could see teeth marks on some. The marks looked far bigger than anything her teeth could make. A knew that that meant there were things bigger and stronger than her around here. She tried to remember if she had ever seen any before. There was the vague impression of wings and beaks, and of claws that jumped. A shuddered to herself and made a mental note to find someplace well-guarded.

She turned away from the skeleton and dragged her crate over to the nearest standing building to inspect it. She hoped she would find something soon. Having seen those teeth marks, she didn’t feel safe out in the open.

* * *

 

A was working with the assumption that the predators roaming outside didn’t know how to climb, or how to work elevators. She’d found a nice little spot in what she guessed had been a hotel of some sort. Fancy, spacious, and, most importantly, a couple of stories high.

She had barricaded the stairs to the best of her ability, dragging in chunks of debris from outside and furniture from other rooms to clog up the stairwells leading to her floor. A had left a small trail for her to burrow through, but it was well-hidden, and going by the teeth marks, far too small for whatever hunted out there. She’d also built a barricade around the doors of the elevators, even though she was sure the predators didn’t know how to use them, even without the barricade. It had taken several days of work, but she thought it best to take no chances with her protection.

While she had built the barricades, she had searched around outside until she found what seemed to be a maintenance outpost near the edge of the… could it be called a village? Anyway, she had found tools in there, including a hammer and a lot of nails, and she had pulled lengths of lumber from the ruined buildings to fortify the windows of her hotel suite. The idea of wings that just wouldn’t leave her head told her she had to make sure it wouldn’t be easy for just anything to fly straight in.

When she was satisfied her suite was protected for now, A spent several days foraging supplies from other suites. Each room had plenty of power outlets, and each room also had a small fridge, and with the help of a small thing on wheels she had found in a closet full of cleaning supplies, she wrestled all the fridges into one room and dubbed it a pantry. She had twelve fridges from one story alone, and figured that was enough for now. Then she stole the blankets and pillows and, with some effort, the mattresses from other rooms, and turned the master bedroom of her suite into one big, fluffy sleeping paradise. There wasn’t an inch of the floor left uncovered, and there were more blankets and pillows than she knew what to do with.

The guests apparently having been chased off, there was aso plenty of luggage for A to raid, and she got all kinds of clothes, toiletries, books and games and other stuff, which she hoarded away into yet another room of her suite. She wasn’t going to waste anything. And to think she hadn’t even gotten to raiding the (souvenir) shops yet.

Then, once her suite wasn’t just safe but also comfortable and ready to be lived in, A gathered as much food as she could find in the other restaurants in her village, filled up her room of mini fridges, stacking food that didn’t have to be kept cool around them, and then she settled into one of her comfy chairs and wondered what she was supposed to do now.

* * *

 

She had yet to see another living soul. The thought hit her when she was reading one of the books she had found inside a suitcase (it was about the park, and at least she knew where she was and what was out there now), and she very nearly dropped it as realization hit. A had counted the days. It was almost five days after settling into her suite, nearly sixteen since leaving her kitchen, and she had yet to see something with a pulse besides herself.

Tossing her book aside, she eased herself out of her chair and limped over to the window to look outside. She scanned the town carefully. Nothing moved. Her books had said the park had entertained almost 20.000 people a day. But A was alone. She had already come to the conclusion something had gone wrong and that the animals now roamed freely, but she had yet to see a dinosaur, and she had yet to see another human. Why? Shouldn’t someone have come to evacuate the visitors? And why had they left her behind? Had they done it on purpose, or had they just accidentally overlooked her? A _had_ been buried underneath the front of a building. She could imagine people not thinking of looking there, or thinking she was dead and deciding to focus on the living instead.

But why hadn’t people come to do a second sweep? If A had been in charge, she would’ve sent more people a couple of days later to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. Or maybe they had, and she had already been holed up in her kitchen by then, so overwhelmed with fever she hadn’t noticed anyone calling.

Suddenly, she wanted to cry. She could’ve been home by now, even if she did not know where home was. A stubbornly wiped at her eyes. She wasn’t even sure if she had a home at all, so why was she feeling so abandoned all of a sudden? It didn’t make sense. Biting at her lip, A pressed her palms against her face, trying to force her eyes to stay dry. She didn’t like crying. Her head was still tender, even though it had easily been two months already since she had crawled out of the debris, and she was prone to the worst migraines whenever she got riled up. This included when she upset herself, and crying was a guarantee for a headache from hell.

A turned away from the window sharply, wincing when her leg twinged at the sudden movement, and limped back to her chair. There was no use in dwelling on this. She’d only make herself sad and depressed. She settled into her chair, drawing the thin blanket she kept there over her legs and picking her book back up. A wasn’t very good at reading yet, but she did her best, even if it was slow going and the words were hard to understand. She was only at chapter two of her book on Jurassic World, and it had taken her almost four days to even get that far. But A was stubborn, and she didn’t want to give up yet. Even if reading hurt her head if she did it for too long at a time. Probably because she had to concentrate so hard.

She’d grabbed a snack before she’d settled in to read a bit, before she’d had her little realization, so A happily snacked on the plain salted chips and washed them down with a sip from her still cold can of Coca Cola. There were all kinds of junk food to find in the various stores and vending machines, and even more in the storage buildings she had found when searching for debris to build barricades, so A was not afraid to indulge.

A slight breeze entered the room from the window, which she had opened at a small crack. A had not yet had cause to leave the safety of the hotel, but she did want some fresh air every now and then, so she tended to keep the window open day and night, except when it rained. She’d built a barricade from some leftover wood to place in front of the open window, as it swung open to outside, to keep the flying predators from sweeping right in and ripping her apart in her very chair.

* * *

 

There was little need for A to leave the suite in the first couple of weeks. She kept track of the days with a permanent marker on the wall, adding about two months for the amount of time she guessed to have been incapacitated and busy securing her little home, and spent most of her time not doing much at all. She ate and slept, struggled to read books, drew when inspiration struck, and, once she figured out how the television worked, watched movies.

It was good every suite in the hotel had a tv, because she’d accidentally broken four of them in her attempts to figure out how to operate them and choose movies from the menu.

Not once did the idea of using one of the telephones to call someone random to get help cross her mind. She didn’t neglect to do so on purpose. It was just something that honestly didn’t come up in her. She barely even noticed the fact that there were telephones available, and when she did notice them, she forgot about them just as quickly. At her age, even if A wasn’t sure how old that was, though she did know she was young, she just didn’t consider the fact that she had the ability and means to communicate with the outside world. As far as A was knew, she was alone, and she was stuck.

So she remained within the safety of the hotel, doing not much of anything at all, and wondered what she was going to do when her food supplies ran out and she was forced to brave the outdoors to get more. She knew there was more food to find around the resort, and that there were supposed to be huge freezers with enough food to feed 20.000 for a week - her book had said so. But A didn’t know where the freezers were, and even if she did, she doubted they were very easy to get into without a key. So she nervously counted her food supplies once every two days, kept track of everything she ate, and worried about the day she was going to have to go outside.

A couldn’t remember ever having been frightened to leave a building before. Then again, even without her memories, she was pretty sure the act of going outside hadn’t amounted to assisted suicide before.

When she slept, she dreamed of wings and beaks and claws that jumped. She woke almost every night, shaking and crying with fear, phantom pains in her leg and arms and a new level of fright at the thought of leaving her hotel suite.

Her head hurt almost constantly.

* * *

 

Eventually, cabin fever began to set in.

With most of her memories gone, her hotel suite was pretty much A’s entire world, but even that was not enough after a while. Sitting next to the window allowed her as much fresh air as she could possibly want, but it was not the same as walking around outside. She wanted to leave her hotel badly. But she was so, so scared of finding what kind of monsters were out there.

She’d tried to go outside once, but by the time she had gotten to the barricade that protected the stairs, her mind had locked up and her body had frozen with fear, and she had been too terrified to move further.

A had not tried again since.

There had been little reason for the fear, but she remembered the terror that had petrified her muscles, and she didn’t ever want to feel that afraid ever again. Instead, she hid in her hotel room, making sure to sit in the breeze wafting in through her wide open window, and tried to convince herself her suite really wasn’t that bad. Surely she could stay safely inside for just a little while longer. There was still food in her pantry room, even if it was starting to run low, she didn’t have to go out just yet. She could afford to stay inside for another week or so without risking starvation.

She made sure not to think too much of walking freely without walls to stop her. Thoughts like those only made her feel more caged in than she already did. If A had known the word, she would have thought she was developing claustrophobia.

* * *

 

Three-and-a-half days later, someone on the mainland finally noticed the phone lines had not been shut off. An hour later, they were. A never noticed.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A goes on her first food trip. Then, inspired by her success, she goes exloring. Things don't go nearly as well the second time she leaves the hotel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: mentions of an attack, violence, injuries, blood and gore.

Finally the day arrived when she really couldn’t stay inside any longer. Her food stores were practically depleted, and that meant A had to go out and find more. One thing was good, though, because while rooting through the luggage of the park’s former guests, she had found a map of the island. It had the supply buildings marked on it quite clearly, though the map also said that it was ‘restricted access’. There was, also clearly marked, a road that led there.

Either way, she now knew where to go to fill up her pantry room.

Now she just had to convince herself to actually leave her hotel. She had been trying to do that for almost an hour now, with very little success. A had managed to force herself down the stairs all the way to the barricade she had built, but she was having a hard time convincing her feet to move farther. She was trembling from head to toe, a sheen of sweat on her skin, and her head hurt so much she wanted to cry. Her hands were white-knuckled, clenched tightly around a kitchen knife (for protection) and the rope of her trusty crate, which she had bound to one of those little thingies with wheels she had used to move the fridges, to transport the food she was planning to get.

It was a small crate, 12’’ wide by 17’’ long and about 12’’ deep, and A knew and dreaded the fact that it was going to take more than a few trips to fill up her pantry room. It meant she was going to have to force herself out multiple times.

A took a very deep, fortifying breath, tucking her knife into her belt and double-checking her crate. The rope that allowed her to pull it was strong, as were the ties that kept the crate bound to the little wheel-board-thingy to make it easier to pull along, and inside the crate were a few supplies. The map of the island, rope, some bottled water, some strips of cloth she had ripped from a bed sheet as makeshift bandages should she get hurt, and an extra knife. Just in case. She also had a small, plain backpack so she could carry the supplies on her back once she needed her crate for food and stuff.

Well, then.

She really had no reason to put this off any longer. With another deep breath, A forced her feet to move and crawled past the barricade. Setting foot outside her hotel for the first time in weeks was terrifying, and it was all A could do not to run back as fast as she could and hide under her bed for the rest of the day. Her head throbbed with renewed force, a migraine of biblical proportions hammering in her skull and almost blurring her vision with the sheer force of the pain.

A whimpered as silently as possible, wishing she had something to make the pain stop. But she hadn’t come across medicine yet. Maybe the storage had medicine to make her head feel better. She would have to check.

Briefly glancing at her map, A set out in the direction of the storage facilities.

* * *

 

It was a few miles of walking, and though A could walk and run on her bad leg, it started to hurt after a while, a slow, deep ache that reminded her of a fresh bruise or a cut that was still healing, only instead of superficial, it was deep in the crooked bone just above her ankle. The side-effect, apart from the increased pain, was that her limp got even worse.

At least her wrist had healed mostly right. Better than her leg, anyway. That break barely hurt anymore; it only ached a little on wet days, or when she had to lift heavy stuff.

With her limp slowing her down, it took A an hour to traverse the two miles between her hotel and the supply storages. She didn’t mind it took longer, though, because she had arrived safely with no obstacles slowing her down and no dinosaurs having tried to eat her. In fact, she had yet to see a single dinosaur at all. Not that she minded, of course. If she never came across a dinosaur, A would be quite happy about it.

Upon arrival, it became quite obvious the island had been abandoned with haste. The tall gates were left unlocked and opened slightly, allowing A to slip through with no problems at all. The same went for the doors of the large, rather cube-ish building that had a sign that designated it to be the food storage facility - no one had bothered to lock them. A had not expected it to be this easy to get in. Again, she did not mind that fact at all. There was an evacuation diagram on the wall, telling A exactly where she would find the freezers and food storage rooms.

She decided to go for non-perishables first, so she turned left in the hallway and opened each door she came across until she found the food. There were more cans, boxes and packages of non-perishable food than A had ever even known existed. She wasted no time stacking her crate with cans of veggies and fruits and condensed milk, as well as jars of jam and chocolate spread, and stacked bags of dried pasta and rice on top. On top of that, she put a cardboard box and filled it with bottles of pop, boxes of cereal, cookies, crackers and jello mix. The tower of food already almost came up to her hip.

A grabbed two more cardboard boxes and went to find the freezers, which were just as plentiful as the non-perishable stocks, if not more so. There, she found meat, fish, dairy products, milk and juice, fresh fruits and veggies and ice cream, and though it would melt on the way back, she piled some cartons into her crate anyway. When she finished selecting food, the tower came up to her shoulders, and A made sure to use the rope she had brought to tie the cardboard boxes containing the food tightly to her crate so it wouldn’t fall off on the way back.

Then, making sure to close the freezers behind her, A began the trip back to her hotel, a little more optimistic.

* * *

 

A made four trips to get food, and though it took her all day, by the time the sun set, her pantry room was once again filled up. There was enough to tide her over for a month and a half at least, maybe even two and a little more.

She went to bed early that night, utterly exhausted from a long day of hard work. Her leg hurt like there was a swarm of angry wasps under her skin, her wrist ached from carrying heavy boxes of food and her head felt like it would split in two at any time - at this point, A would welcome a nice, cool breeze on her brain.

Still, she honestly felt a lot better with the knowledge that she had a filled pantry in the next room and relatively easy access to more food when she ran out again.

She slept better than she had in weeks.

* * *

 

It stormed. A huddled under the covers of her bed, eyes clenched shut, and tried not to whimper when a flash of lightning bright enough to penetrate through the covers was followed by thunder so loud she was convinced the building was going to collapse on top of her. Outside, the wind howled, and she could hear the grinding of stone on stone coming from outside, and the groaning of wood slowly being pulled apart by the force of the gale.

There was another flash of lightning, followed by the sound of boulders being smashed together by giants, and A couldn’t stop the frightened tears from leaking past her eyelids.

* * *

 

The success of her food trips did a good job at bolstering her confidence, and A found herself wanting to explore the outside. This was new, because just over a week ago, before her food trips, she’d been terrified at the thought of leaving her hotel. And now here she was, planning to leave voluntarily, with no reason beyond the fact that she wanted to explore the resort. If that went well, and she didn’t die in the process, she was planning to explore the various attractions after, to see what had happened to those after the evacuation.

So, on the day she was going to risk her life again, A stood beside her bed at the crack of dawn. Since she had looted the luggage of other guests, she had plenty of clothes to wear, but she hadn’t managed to find any shoes that fit, so she had to go barefoot. Well, the resort had plenty of stores, so maybe she could find herself some shoes there.

Dressed, A made her way out of her bedroom and into her pantry to find some breakfast. After some contemplation she chose a can of tropical fruit cocktail in syrup, as well as some chocolate cookies and a small carton of milk from her milk fridge. She had an automatic can opener, which she used to open her can of fruit, grabbed a fork, and made her way into the living room of her suite to have breakfast.

She turned on the tv, wanting to watch some cartoons before she went out. She liked morning cartoons, and the library of series and movies the tv had had plenty of cartoons for her to watch. She’d just started on Kim Possible, and there was plenty of time to watch an episode or two before she set out to explore.

Three episodes of Kim Possible and a full tummy later, A had a kitchen knife tucked into her belt and her crate on wheels next to her as the elevator brought her down to the ground floor. The elevator had come in very handy when she’d had to bring her food upstairs to the third floor, where she lived, and also in taking her empty crate down again, because she was too lazy to carry it down three flights of stairs.

Once she was on the ground floor, A quickly crawled past the barricade, a little more confident in herself than she had been a week ago.

In the four or so months she could remember (and she guessed that that was how long she had been in the island), the resort had not started to look any better than it had when she’d crawled out from under the debris. The corpses were reduced to skeletons, picked clean of flesh, the only things covering them ripped clothing and the occasional bag or souvenir. The buildings were still abandoned, some of them were still torn down and reduced to rubble, the asphalt was still cracked in places and debris was still strewn around the place.

Cautiously, A began to make her way from the safety of her hotel. She had had her eye on the large pyramid-shaped building that, according to the map, was called the ‘innovation center’ for a while now, and she was dying to know what was in there. A was sure that there were all kinds of interesting things to find in that building, and if not, she could at least have fun exploring it and snooping behind each door.

Taking a healthy amount of caution into account, it took A about fifteen minutes to traverse the distance between her hotel and the innovation center. She didn’t see any signs of life beyond a few bugs and a single dragonfly, and she was quite happy about that, as she was not looking forward to coming face to teeth with a honest-to-God dinosaur.

The doors were not locked (she seemed to be in luck when it came to doors) and A pushed them open with some effort - they were a little heavy for her, but she managed. The inside of the innovation center was nothing like she had expected. It was a fairly open space, with lots of screens against the walls, a dinosaur skeleton of sorts in a chunk of stone tucked a bit out of the way, and lots of computer-like consoles with glass screens above them. There was a huge spiralling staircase that led to higher floors too.

Overcome with curiosity, A abandoned her crate-cart at the doors and went to investigate the pile of bones first. There was a small plaque next to it, and she squinted at the letters in an attempt to figure out what it was there for. There were a lot of long words she didn’t understand, like in her books, but there was an easier translation written under it in bigger letters, and they said that the pile of bones was there to fake dig up, apparently for ‘fun and learning for your children!’. There was no age written under ‘children’.

A glanced down at herself, and wondered how old she was and if she still counted as ‘children’. The skeletons outside were a lot bigger than her, and A knew that those were called ‘adults’, and that children were smaller than adults. Nodding to herself, A decided to classify herself under ‘children’ and wasted no time in trying to figure out how to dig up that skeleton. There were tools scattered around, small shovels and brushes and little things that expelled air through a tube when you squeezed them, so A gathered them up and piled them next to her, trying to decide which to use first. There was no pickaxe or something to chip away at the rock, so she supposed she wasn’t actually meant to dig the skeleton out of the rock but expose what was already there instead.

A grabbed the small shovel and started to move the sand and bits of gravel aside.

Digging up the bones wasn’t as exciting as it sounded, and A lost interest in it fairly quickly. She tossed the tools aside and went to inspect the computers instead. They had screens that reacted when you touched them, and no buttons. She spent some time playing around with them, delighted whenever a new image popped up. Most of them were colourful, and there was information written beside them in words that were short and easy enough for A to be able to read and comprehend.

Then she arrived at the last computer console, which boasted something called ‘hologram technology’. A wasn’t exactly sure what a ‘hologram technology’ was, but she was willing to find out. The display was filled with tiny pictures of dinosaurs, and because she couldn’t pronounce the names or knew any other characteristics, she just picked one that looked like it ate plants and wouldn’t kill her on sight. Carefully, she selected the icon.

A moment later she had a face full of dinosaur, and A couldn’t have stifled the terrified noise she made if she tried, even as she scrambled behind the console for cover. She tried not to whimper, eyes clenched shut, heart racing, barely breathing with complete terror as she waited for the thing to gore her. Nothing happened. Very, very carefully, A opened her eyes. She strained her hearing, but besides the low buzz of the computers, the hum of the lights, her laboured breathing and the frantic beat of her heart, there were no noises. A continued to press herself against the console, trying to work up the courage to peek around it. Her head pounded with a brand new headache, the likes of which she hadn’t suffered in days.

It took several minutes, but finally A managed to force herself to move, and she crawled to the edge of the console as quietly as she could, ready to jump up and make a run for it at any moment.

The dinosaur wasn’t a dinosaur at all.

A stared in shock at the see-through, somewhat blue-coloured… hologram? Was this what a ‘hologram technology’ was? Make scary moving images of real things? She blew out a breath of air as she climbed to her feet, a little upset that she’d been so afraid of something that wasn’t real. Then again, with the way her head sometimes didn’t work right and her thoughts sometimes seemed more real than the actual world around her, A was not really surprised she’d fallen for it. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d seen something and believed it was real, only to find it wasn’t.

Once she had her heartbeat under control, A spent at least an hour playing with the hologram machine, cycling past each dino in the system several times. They moved in a surprisingly lifelike way, and though the meat eaters scared her (they reminded her too much of wings and beaks and claws that jumped), the plant eaters were nice to watch. Finally, that too became boring, so A decided to move on.

The staircase was tempting, but there was a hallway across the room that led deeper into the building, and that one was just a little more tempting than the stairs. A quickly retrieved her crate from where she had left it near the front doors, and pulled it behind her as she went to investigate the hallway. It was a wide hallway, easily twenty feet across, and the walls were made of glass and had a view on what looked to be a lab of some sorts. There were all kinds of fancy machines A didn’t know the purpose of, and posters with odd pictures and long words on them on the far walls.

One of the glass walls was shattered, giving her access to the labs, and A took advantage of it without thinking twice. It wasn’t like there was anyone to stop her anyway. She could pretty much do whatever she wanted, no consequences. Well, as long as she wasn’t stupid enough to do something that got her hurt, anyway, but beyond that, no consequences.

A was halfway through inspecting an odd machine with a see-through plastic dome on top that had little remains of eggshells in it when she finally noticed the smell. Something in here stank to high heaven, rot and old blood and something visceral and coppery. It was a familiar smell - it reminded her of the fragmented, blurry bits of memory she had of being stuck under a pile of rock, and then pain and hunger and fever? A wasn’t sure, her memory wasn’t so good, but she was pretty sure she’d smelled death then too.

Dropping the rope of her crate, A pulled her kitchen knife from her belt and cautiously made her way over to the half-open door the stench came from. It became stronger the closer she came, and A felt a little queasy by the time she pushed the door open fully. Behind the door was another lab, smaller but with even fancier machines. Little terrariums were stacked on shelves, and inside were the tiny skeletons of little animals that had, most likely, starved to death, because nothing could go for months without food, and A sure as hell hadn’t fed them. That wasn’t where the smell came from, though, and it was not hard to find out where it did come from. A only had to look away from the terrariums before she found herself staring at yet another glass wall (behind was some storage space), partly smashed to pieces. It was splattered with old blood. She could see where it had dripped down and puddled on the floor.

In the puddle of blood was a not-quite decomposed body. Most of the bones were visible, but this must’ve been a large person, because not all the flesh was gone yet. A stared, not really all that bothered by the sight. It wasn’t that different from the skeletons outside. It just stank more, and it looked more like something had used it as a chew toy. Which, honestly, was not that bad a guess, considering where she was stuck.

After staring for a while, A decided that she had spent enough time in the lab. Time to go do something else. It wasn’t like she understood anything of the machines and what they were used for anyway, so there wasn’t that much to do for her here. She did take the stairs, this time, leaving her crate on the ground floor because she couldn’t be bothered to drag it up with her. There wasn’t much of interest up there either, mostly just what seemed to be exhibits on dinosaurs, which was nice and all, but A’s reading wasn’t nearly good enough for her to make sense of the information offered. Maybe once she got a little better at reading, she could come and give it another try, but until then, all she could really do was look at the pictures and samples of bone and stuff, and that, to be honest, was not really that interesting to her.

A hesitated on the stairs for a moment, and then decided not to go see the third floor right now. She’d already spent a couple of hours investigating the first two floors, and she was getting a little tired. Also, her leg was starting to ache from the constant movement. She wasn’t used to moving around this much, as she usually spent all her time in her hotel suite, which left her with a limited amount of room to walk and be active. It was about time to get back to said hotel suite, so she could rest a little and take the strain off her bad leg. She could have a snack and watch some more Kim Possible, and maybe work a little on her reading.

Decision made, A padded down the stairs, retrieved her crate, and quickly made her way outside. The sun was far higher than when she’d gone inside, but A didn’t know how to read time at the hand of the sun, nor did she have a watch. It was hot, but in the time she had been stuck on this island, A had grown used to the temperatures and the humidity, so it didn’t bother her as much as it had in the beginning.

A was barely twenty feet from the hotel when the sound of a screech-y caw-like sound froze her in her tracks.

There was a vague impression of wings and beaks, the images slicing at her mind like shards of glass. Vaguely, deep inside her mind, she could hear a male voice yelling something, but she couldn’t make out the words.

Heart suddenly racing, A grasped for her kitchen knife, slowly turning in the direction of the cawing noise.

It was nearly as big as she was, perched on a roof, with huge leathery wings and a squarish face containing lots and lots of sharp, sharp teeth. It’s yellow eyes were fixed solidly on A. She froze, her breath stuttering in her lungs, and hoped that if she didn’t move, it would go away.

It didn’t.

It let out another caw, spreading it’s wings and suddenly swooping down with terrifying speed, talons outstretched. A did the only thing she could think of. She screamed and ran as fast as she could, abandoning her cart in favour of self-preservation. Unfortunately, her bad leg slowed her down pretty significantly.

Talons sliced into her left shoulder and upper arm, and this time the screams were of pain instead of terror. The dino flapped it’s wings, and A felt her feet slowly leave the ground, even as she tried to wrestle loose. She struggled not to pass out, the pain in her arm and shoulder so bad she felt like she was going to faint, but she managed to bring up the knife in her right hand and blindly slash at the dino’s legs.

It worked; the screech of pain nearly burst her eardrums, but the beast let go, and A crashed nearly ten feet to the ground. Her bad leg snapped under her on impact; white-hot agony raced up the limb, feeling a hundred times worse than the first time she had broken it, and little white lights burst behind her eyelids when her head smacked against the asphalt - hard. She struggled to remain conscious. She was only barely aware that she had partially landed on her knife as well, the blade slicing deep into her side, and didn’t even really notice that her left shoulder had been pulled out of it’s socket.

Luckily, it seemed that one good cut was enough to scare off the flying menace for now, leaving A crumpled on the ground, crying in pain and fear and only barely conscious, but no longer under attack.

It was a good twenty minutes before she managed to collect herself enough to be able to assess herself. Her leg felt like an angry lumberjack had been working on it, her side stung and bled, and her arm felt like it had been ripped half off. She tried to move, and quickly stopped when even the slightest movement had nausea crashing through her, bile rising in her throat. Dear whatever deity was out there, she’d really messed up her head this time. She just hoped she wouldn’t lose her memory again, because she didn’t want to have to start all over for the second time.

First, though, she needed to figure out her next move. In the end, it took her near half an hour and several tries before A managed to sit up, but it made her so nauseous she threw up three times, losing every bit of the breakfast she’d had that morning. Once she was sitting, the first thing she did was quickly scanning the air with her eyes, just to be sure there wasn’t another of those things around. Then, finally, she allowed herself to scrutinize her injuries.

Her arm was hanging limply at her side, and when she tried to move it, pain sliced through the dislocated joint and the deep, jagged cuts in her shoulder and upper arm started bleeding more heavily. The cut in her side was nearly six inches long and almost one deep, and it bled like nothing she had seen before. Her leg, though… her leg was snapped at the exact same spot as last time, only worse. It wasn’t just a crick now. Her foot was twisted around to the side, and though her skin wasn’t broken, the broken bones stuck at a sharp angle. Just looking at it, A knew that not only was it going to be utter hell to set and heal, that limp of hers might just become an inability to walk instead.

Before she could do anything, though, she had to get to safety. She’d ran in the direction of her hotel when that thing had snatched her off her feet, so she was only ten feet or so from the doors, but she still had to get inside, into the elevator, and three floors up to her suite. That was where the little medical supplies she had were hidden. She needed those to make herself better. That did mean, of course, that she had to reach them first. And, as good as A was at crawling (practise makes perfect), it went a lot faster if she had both her arms to pull herself forward. Except that one arm was currently out of commission. That would have to be fixed.

A glanced at her arm, and then at her shoulder and the odd dip where the joint should have connected, and wondered how the hell a dislocated joint was even set. Maybe if she just wrenched at it until it was in the right spot again? It had worked with her leg the first time around, surely it would work on her shoulder? Well, it was worth a try, if nothing else, because A wasn’t sure what else she could do anyway. She’d never dealt with dislocated joints before.

She forced herself to take hold of her arm, just under her shoulder, making sure not to touch any of the gashes that littered her skin. Then, taking a deep breath to steel herself, A moved her arm and pushed, and screamed hoarsely when the joint slid into the socket with a wet, suction-y popping noise. The initial pain, sharp and slicing, faded fast, but after it came a slow, deep, burning kind of pain that radiated through her whole arm and out to her torso, throbbing dully like the aftershocks of a large, heavy hammer.

Once she had herself somewhat under control, A decided to make a try to get inside. Both arms were semi-functional, she should be able to drag herself into the hotel by now, even if she knew that it would not be easy nor painless.

Trying to ignore the dizziness and the blurry quality of her vision, A forced herself past the pain and got to work.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A deals with her newest set of injuries and battles illness. She comes to a realization that'll make surviving Isla Nublar even harder for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter four is up. It's a bit shorter than ch. 3, but it'll have to do for now.
> 
> Warning: this deals with illness and permanent injury. If that's triggering for you, don't read this.

Getting up to her suite took a while. And with ‘a while’, she meant ‘two hours of which she spent at least half unconscious after she passed out for the umpteenth time’. She’d managed to make it into her hotel room, though, and had even succeeded in dragging herself over to her bed, where she kept her stash of bandages and the small amount of painkillers she had managed to find in the hotel some days ago.

Once she was seated on her bed with her back against the headboard, A took a couple of minutes to catch her breath, and then set to treating herself. She wrapped up the gash in her side with some bandages, and did the same for the gashes in her shoulder and upper arm, paying extra attention to immobilizing her shoulder as much as possible. It hurt, but once she had wrapped herself up, she swallowed a handful of pain pills from the bottle she had, so the pain had to get better relatively quickly.

All that was left now was her leg.

It would have to be set again. And this time, she would have to use a makeshift splint to keep it as straight as possible.

A was suddenly very glad that she hadn’t thrown out the bits of wood left over from when she had built her window protection thingy. It wasn’t ideal, but with some lengths of wood and a lot of bandages, she should be able to cobble something halfway useful together.

She deliberately waited for the painkillers to kick in before she even touched her leg. Best to make this as quick and painless as she could, and she knew how much this kind of thing hurt without something to take off the edge.

When the painkillers finally did kick in, it took another few minutes for her to work up the courage to actually get to it, her last experience with setting broken bones suddenly sharp and vivid in her memory. It had to be done, though. She couldn’t leave her leg like it was.

A made double sure she had the stuff needed for a splint near, took several deep breaths until she felt a little more sure of herself, reached out to her ankle, grasped it firmly, and _wrenched_.

* * *

 

Outside of the hotel, more of the flying menaces flocked, attracted by the scent of freshly spilled blood, making enough noise to wake the dead. They were momentarily scared into flight when a loud, piercing scream of agony came from the hotel, but soon regained their courage and continued to flock.

__

* * *

 

When A woke up, a long, long time later, the splint tight around her leg and the bandages firm at her shoulder and side, her mind worked slowly and sluggishly, like her thoughts were swimming in molasses, and it took her far too long to recognize the fever.

The memories she had of fever were vague and indistinct, and she didn’t remember fever hurting this much. Or being this hot. Or involving this much nausea. Her head hurt. Why was her head hurting again? And why didn’t her eyes focus like they should?

She tried to move, but even blinking aggravated her nausea to the point she threw up, and she couldn’t move her head enough to get the vomit out of her mouth and suddenly she was coughing and choking and gasping for air and her lungs hurt and there was so much pain and she was so scared and -

* * *

 

Time was a somewhat fluid thing. She was unconscious for long stretches of time.

Sometimes, she woke up, and then she shivered and sweated and cried ( _someone, anyone, please, it hurts, help me_ ), and then she exhausted herself until she passed out again.

Sometimes, when she was half-awake and screaming incoherently, she saw things, vivid images that made her head hurt worse and her heart race even harder in terror, and then she didn’t scream anymore but instead begged for someone to make it stop until her raw, hoarse voice faltered and broke (no one was ever there).

She wasn’t aware of the wounds of the dino’s talons breaking open under the bandages and leaking a combination of blood and infected ooze, and she wasn’t aware of the cut in her side festering against her ribs, and she didn’t notice the grinding of the broken bones of her leg whenever she kicked out at nothing. The pain was perpetual and omnipresent, augmented by searing, feverish heat and occasional bouts of freezing, teeth-chattering cold.

On too few occasions, she managed to reach out to the bottled water on the nightstand of her bed, and she drank as much as she could, though not nearly enough.

When she slept, she dreamt, and they were dreams of amorphous monsters with thousands of sharp, sharp teeth and a hundred malevolent yellow eyes, and her hotel as it melted around her into strangely moving puddles of technicolour paint, and faceless skeletons that morphed into half-rotting flying beasts in the corner of her vision and other things that were impossible yet utterly, convincingly real, and everything was too bright and too dark all at once and she was so _scared_ all the time.

It took eight days for the fever to break.

Eight days of barely drinking and not eating at all, eight days of infection and delirium, eight days before A was even aware enough to notice she had thrown up and wet the bed more than once and had been stuck in her own filth for just as long. It was… unpleasant to say the least.

Once she was capable of moving without passing out, though she was as weak as a newborn babe and about just as aware of her surroundings, the first thing A did was crawl into the bathroom for a wash. The water was cold and she nearly drowned herself in the tub, but it was so worth it.

* * *

 

She couldn’t digest solid food.

It was something A figured out fairly quickly after she tried to eat some of a very bruised and overly ripe apple (it was the closest thing she could reach), because as soon as the first few bites hit her stomach, they came right back up. But she was starving with hunger, not having eaten for eight days, and she needed sustenance. So A fell back on what had, over the past few months, become her favourite food.

Sweetened condensed milk.

A had stocked up during the day she’d gotten food, and she had four trays of 24 cans - plenty to tide her over until she could eat something more substantial. She had the automatic can opener to open the cans for her (she was too weak to open them herself, even if they were the kind of lids that came with a lip so they could be pulled open), and she didn’t bother pouring the milk into a cup or grabbing a spoon, instead drinking it straight from the can.

It was thick and creamy and sweet and loaded with calories, and it was exactly what A needed to get her back on her metaphorical feet. Her metaphorical feet, because her leg was nowhere near healed enough to support her, and she wasn’t even going to try until she was sure it could.

Finally, once she was clean and fed, A crawled over to the comfy chair she usually sat in (no way she was going to sleep in her bed before that mess had been cleaned up) and took stock of herself.

She was weak and dizzy, and her leg hurt like a colony of enraged hornets had taken up residence in the bone, and the cuts in her arm and shoulder felt like hot pokers were being pressed into them, the joint of her shoulder made home by what felt like smouldering coals. How she knew what hornets, hot pokers and smouldering coals felt like, A did not know, nor did she want to know. The headache, that almost seemed perpetual nowadays, was pretty bad and didn’t seem like it was going to lessen anytime soon.

What was more worrying at the moment were the other things she’d noticed during the duration of her bath and meal. Most apparent (and most frightening) was that the fuzzy blurriness in her vision hadn’t abated at all. At short distances, her vision was fairly clear, but anything farther than a few feet slowly turned fuzzy until twenty feet or so, after which everything turned into colourful, indistinct blobs.

The second thing A had noticed was that her hands didn’t always do what she wanted, though that could also be a result of the fact that she hadn’t eaten for eight days and had been weakened by fever and sickness. Either way, when she’d been washing herself, her fingers wouldn’t close around the sponge at first, and she had dropped her can of condensed milk several times on the way to have it opened. Her hands shook almost constantly, and sometimes her bad arm spasmed randomly.

It was something she would have to monitor for a while, to see if it would go away once she regained a little of her strength and got a bit healthier.

Lastly, because she’d been doing a complete check-up, she noticed her speech. A had not spoken for a long time, but she knew what she was supposed to sound like. And this was not it. She remembered her words, and she knew how to form sentences, it was just… the pronunciation was off. She slurred. It was all there, in her head, but when she tried to talk, the words came out warped and slow.

* * *

 

After a few days, upon finding out that snack cakes were soft enough for her to eat if she dipped them into her condensed milk, twinkies were incorporated into her current diet, as were applesauce and ripe bananas after she mashed them with a fork. It was limited, but it worked for her, and the bananas and applesauce did a good job at giving her some of the vitamins she needed to get a little healthier.

The condensed milk, especially, was good to help her gain weight, because she had lost far too many pounds when she’d been sick. A didn’t like the way she could count her ribs, or how thin her wrists were.

* * *

 

The blurry vision and the headaches didn’t get better. Nor did the sudden clumsiness, shakes and arm spasms she seemed to have picked up from nowhere, or the problems with her speech. That knock to her head had been harder than she thought.

A comforted herself with the knowledge that, at least, she hadn’t lost her memories again.

It didn’t really help her sleep at night.

* * *

 

Her earlier guess had been right. Her leg was bad.

It had healed, though it had taken almost four weeks before she could even try to stand on it, and another three before she was confident enough in the strength of the bone to try taking off her splint. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that she couldn’t _use_ it.

Her ankle wouldn’t move, and she could barely bend her knee (she hadn’t even noticed she’d hurt her knee also), and it never stopped hurting.

Like she had guessed, weeks earlier, the second break had rendered her leg useless. She couldn’t walk anymore without something to support her leg for her, because it was no longer capable of doing it on it’s own.

She was disabled.

And it turned A’s world on it’s axis like even amnesia had not managed to do. What was she supposed to do now? How was she supposed to execute her next food run in a couple of weeks if she couldn’t walk without support?

And even if she did manage to walk, the pain was nearly enough to not have her bother trying all on it’s own, because something in there was seriously wrong, and she didn’t know what it was or how she was supposed to fix it.

And now she was on the subject anyway, she couldn’t lift her bad arm past her shoulder.

How was she supposed to survive if she was too hurt to look after herself?

* * *

 

It took her two weeks to figure out to make a working brace to help her function, and another week to put it together. Her hands were still clumsy and shaking, and her arm sometimes jerked so badly she involuntarily threw things across the room, so it took longer to make the brace than she had hoped for, but somehow, she managed.

The end result of her attempt at engineering was big and clunky, and the hinges at her knee got stuck half of the time, and it was hellishly uncomfortable, but she could stand without leaning on something, and with some practise, she could slowly hobble around without using her makeshift crutch.

Except for one thing… The brace was tight, it had to be to keep her leg from buckling under her, and it pressed against her ankle and knee, and when A had it on, it hurt to the point she wanted to cry. Sometimes, not walking at all seemed like the better alternative, especially after she found out that wearing the brace for longer than a few hours at a time made her foot go numb and tingly, but she really didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.

She really wasn’t looking forward to her next food run.

* * *

 

The nightmares were back. A couldn’t remember a time they’d been worse. She learned to deal with it, though.

And besides, she really didn’t do all that much because it was too much of an effort to constantly put on her brace so she could move around, so most of her time was spent lying in bed catching up on the sleep she missed because of the nightmares. When you slept nearly eighteen hours a day, it really didn’t matter so much if you woke up screaming five times in a row.

It wasn’t like she wasn’t already sleeping plenty anyway, so she could afford to miss a few hours here and there.

Still, that didn't stop A from wishing she had something to stare at other than the ceiling. It got really, really boring after a while.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A works on something to protect herself with, watches cartoons, and goes exploring again. She finds something that'll make life on Isla Nublar just a little easier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're officially halfway through, people - chapter five out of ten is up. There's still some way's to go, though, so take a seat, hold on to your butts (hah, get it? Jurassic Park 1? Nvm.), and enjoy.

Despite the fact that she had been disabled and probably brain damaged, the attack did not dampen A’s curiosity at all.

Granted, the terror that had prevented her from leaving her hotel earlier on was back with a vengeance, but still… A wanted to know what the rest of the island was like. She was getting really sick of sitting in her suite doing nothing but sleeping, eating and watching cartoons. Even if Kim Possible, Phineas and Ferb and Totally Spies were all kinds of entertaining. She couldn’t exactly sit around and do nothing forever, even if the thought of going outside once again had her shaking with terror.

But the fact that cabin fever was hitting her hard didn’t mean A hadn’t learned from being attacked by some flying monster with really big teeth. She was far more cautious about going outside this time around. And she was going to make sure that, this time, she was capable of defending herself before those things could get to her.

For that purpose, she had scrounged around the hotel for all the sharp knives she could find (and as the hotel had a restaurant, there were plenty of knives) to make herself a weapon. She didn’t know how to make a bow, nor did she know how to shoot one, but she could tie a very sharp, very large kitchen knife to a long, sturdy stick and call it a spear.

She used some string and a roll of duct tape to make sure the knives would not be coming loose anytime soon.

Just to be sure, she made three of them, so she would still have some way to defend herself even if she broke two. Three should be enough, right? They should be enough to defend her, yet not too hard or heavy to carry around with her. She could keep one in hand and transport the other two with her trusty crate on wheels.

Her crate - such a useful thing. She loved it almost as much as she did her trusty mixing bowl, and she utterly adored her mixing bowl - it was her first possession (that she could remember, anyways), and that made it special.

* * *

 

A finished the third spear with shaking hands, winding the duct tape tight around the string that tied the knife to the stick, to make sure the knots couldn’t come out and the string couldn’t snap and make her weapon useless. She covered the entire handle of the knife and the part of the stick it was pressed against with tape, as well as a few inches under the knife, and then carefully took hold of the back of the blade and pulled at it to test the bonds she had made. It didn’t budge.

Just to be sure, and like she had done with the other two spears, she used some of the liquid glue (super-strong and flexible, according to the packaging, once she had managed to read it) she had found in a closet full of cleaning and repair stuff, and poured it into the tiny spaces between the tape, the knife and the wood, to further strengthen the structural integrity. Once the glue was poured in and brimming at the top, A wound another, final layer of tape around the whole thing, sealing the glue inside, and then laid her spear aside so the glue could dry and harden.

A had never built a spear before, and she figured it was better to be safe than sorry - in this case, overkill was the way to go.

Tomorrow, she’d take another shot at exploring.

Hopefully it would go better this time. A did not want to end up fighting for her life again - not so soon after the first time. Or at all, really. She’d suffered more than enough pain and injuries for as far as she was concerned, certainly more than plenty for one lifetime. If she could avoid any more, she would.

And for that, she now had her spears to defend herself with. She just hoped they were enough.

* * *

 

Preparing for her second exploration trip took a bit longer than the first time, when she’d been up at six and ready to go at seven-thirty.

Now, a generous ten weeks later (she’d given her leg plenty of time to heal as much as possible and it had taken some time to make the brace that allowed her to hobble), things went quite a bit slower. As she had grown used to sleeping the majority of the time, she didn’t wake before ten and took nearly half an hour before she could muster the energy to get out of bed.

Then, maneuvering herself to sit on the edge of the bed, A reached for the clothes she had left out the evening before to dress; she’d had a wash before going to bed, after she’d made her spears, so she didn’t have to worry about that. Her second injury, during which she’d been stuck in her own vomit and other disgusting fluids for days, had left her with a distinct need to wash regularly, and she made it a point to wash herself at least once a day, usually before she went to bed.

A peeled off her pajamas, which consisted of an oversized men’s shirt she’d found in a random suitcase, and exchanged it for a smaller shirt she’d found in a suitcase that had, most likely, belonged to a boy a bit bigger than her. It fit reasonably well, and it was a pleasant shade of soft blue that didn’t make her head hurt (worse than it usually did, anyway) when she looked at it for too long. As she still didn’t have shoes, she didn’t wear socks, but it took a little longer to wrestle her way into a pair of shorts. Mostly because of her leg. Her knee could barely bend, and it hurt when she pressed on the area around her ankle, where the breaks had been, so it took a few moments to pull the pant leg on without hurting herself too much.

Then, once she was dressed, A grabbed a few painkillers and washed them down with a few swallows of water - also part of her daily routine nowadays. She made a mental note to search for more pills today, because hers were running out.

Grabbing her brace from the floor next to the bed, where she usually kept it at night, A started on the laborious process of putting it on. Because she had had to scrounge together the materials to make her brace, it was a clunky, mismatched thing with some bulk to it, made entirely out of scraps of wood, duct tape, rope made out of torn strips of cloth, and buckles cut from clothing and belts. There was a part that wound around A’s thigh, just above her knee, with hinges taken from a door to connect the upper part with the part that sat under her knee, which, in turn, supported the contraption around her foot and ankle. It was all interconnected in such a way that, when stood on, the brace kept most of the pressure off A’s ankle and the piece of bone where the breaks had been and kept her knee from giving way under her weight.

It was not a pretty thing, nor was it of high quality or very sound, but it worked, and that was all A needed it to do.

Once her brace was on and buckled tightly, A stood up, wincing when the perpetual dull ache in her leg immediately flared into something sharper and more acute. Even the relative lack of pressure on her ankle and knee couldn’t stop that. She’d just have to live with it, though, and besides, the pain pills should kick in soon enough.

Now, she wanted some breakfast. A slowly hobbled into her food storage room. It wasn’t yet empty, but she was going to have to go on another food run soon enough. She ignored that thought and made a beeline for her favorite food in the world; sweetened condensed milk. She was almost out, there were only a few cans left, and A dreaded the day she was going to have to go without. It had become a staple in her diet.

She picked out a can, and then gathered some other things to have with the milk. Canned peaches, today, she decided. And Eggos. A had discovered that Eggos were even better with condensed milk than Twinkies were.

Breakfast chosen, A grabbed a fork to eat her peaches with, and didn’t bother grabbing something to drink; she could just drink the syrup the peaches came in. She’d ran out of juice and regular milk a couple of weeks ago anyway, and though she liked water as much as the next person, she didn’t feel like having it at the moment.

Once she’d used the automatic can opener for just that purpose, A retreated over to her usual comfy chair and switched on the tv. She had long since finished watching Kim Possible, Phineas and Ferb and Totally Spies, and was now busy watching Danny Phantom, which was also entertaining, even if A wasn’t sure she liked the thought of ghosts. She was sure that, if they were real like this cartoon suggested, her island would be full of them - plenty of people had died here, after all. A didn’t want to be haunted by ghosts. Things were hard enough as it was. She didn’t need that on top of everything else.

Still, Danny Phantom was entertaining, so she watched it.

A ate calmly, not in any hurry to go. She’d readied her crate yesterday evening before she’d gone to bed, so she already had some supplies in the shape of some rope, her spears (the glue had dried wonderfully), her map, a bottle of water and a small lunch in the shape of some crackers, some fruit jam to go on the crackers, a can of mandarin oranges with a ring tab, and a packet of fudge cookies as a treat. A liked cookies. And canned fruit. Condensed milk would always be her favourite, though, because it was just so delicious.

Once she’d eaten, she tossed aside the empty cans and threw the fork she’d used into the plastic bowl she kept the dirty dishes in until it was dish washing day, finally ready to actually leave. She hobbled over to her crate; two spears were loosely bound to the top, and the third was leaned against it, ready to be picked up and carried around for protection. A did just that, grabbing the rope of her crate with her other hand so she could pull it along behind her.

She took the elevator down, padding over to the barrier. Because of her leg, she could no longer crawl under it, so instead she had made a spot that was protected, but easy for her to slip through without having to crawl or crouch. She walked as quietly as she could, wincing at every clunk of her brace hitting the ground, and hid behind the wall of the hotel to peer out of the front doors and scan the rooftops and sky. Nothing moved. A stayed still and hidden for another couple of minutes regardless, just in case, and was relieved to see nothing changed.

Her hands shook worse than usual as she clutched her spear and the rope of her crate, but A took a couple of deep breaths and stepped out anyway. She could feel her heart racing in her chest, but she didn’t stop; she’d let fear overwhelm her before, and she didn’t want to let it do that to her again. She’d been stuck in her suite long enough.

The goal of today’s trip was to explore the employees-only area she had spotted across Main Street. She wasn’t sure what was in there, but it looked like an oversized, outdoor hallway with lots of huge metal doors, and A was curious.

Her curiosity would probably get her killed one day, but she’d deal with that once it actually happened.

It wasn’t like she honestly had a lot to lose anyway, to be completely frank. She was alone and stuck, she didn’t even really know who she was, and the only thing she would leave behind was a mutilated hotel room. A had, deep down, already accepted the fact that she would most likely die alone on this island. If people hadn’t come for her by now, they either thought she was dead, or they just didn’t give a damn.

She moved slowly, partly because of her leg, partly out of caution. She didn’t want to be caught off-guard again, so she continuously scanned her surroundings, keeping her spear close. It felt a little stupid, considering there was nothing alive as far as she could see, but hey, better safe than sorry, right?

She crossed Main Street (she was pretty sure it was called Main Street, due to the fallen sign she’d spotted) and limped into the ‘hallway’ slowly. Just in the first hundred feet, she could see the remains of a dead body - apparently, more people had died on this island than she had first thought. A hobbled around one of the bodies with a generous arch, keeping some space between her and the bones, and tried not to think of the fact that she herself would likely end up like that. The thought wasn’t a nice one, and she tried to forget it as soon as possible as she skirted around some rubble.

A paused when she came across one of the huge metal doors - it was different from the others in the sense that it was open. None of the other doors were opened. Why was this one open, then, when the rest was firmly shut? A little warily, A shuffled over and peered around the edge. Behind the door was jungle. Some of the biggest trees A had ever seen towered high over her, the canopy shutting out the sunlight, and in the soil just inside the paddock (A was pretty sure this was a paddock for some kind of creature) was a faded indentation of the single largest footprint A had ever seen in her life.

Just looking at it had her shivering at the thought of a beast big enough to leave prints like those. The toes alone were probably bigger than A’s torso. She did not want to know what was responsible for that print. And she was not stupid enough to go find out.

Resolutely turning her back on the paddock, A hurried away as fast as her leg would let her, her crate rolling along behind her.

Some time later, she came across something else that caught her attention.

A car.

A had watched enough cartoons to recognize a car when she saw one, and she was interested immediately, because it was the first vehicle she had seen so far. She quickly hobbled over, trying the door of the driver’s seat, and was surprised when it proved to be unlocked. She opened it, glancing in. The keys were in the contact.

A leaned against the car, unable to quite believe her luck. If this thing had fuel (thank you, cartoons, for teaching her cars ran on fuel), and if she could teach herself to drive it, her next food trip might just become a hell of a lot easier than she could ever have hoped for. She pushed away from the car, leaving her loose spear on top of her crate with her other spears, and limped over to the boot to see if there was any stuff in there, and upon opening it, came across four steel 5-gallon jerrycans, complete with a screw-on spout tucked underneath one of the canister’s handles.

A, with some effort, dragged one of the heavy jerrycans closer and screwed off the lid, and then recoiled from the sharp scent that came from it. It made her eyes water and her nose sting, and she was willing to bet that this was the fuel her cartoons had hinted at. She screwed the lid back on and lightly shook the other three canisters; all were full. That meant she had at least 20 gallons of fuel, and if she managed to learn how to drive, she could see if there was more to find at the storage facility she had gotten her food at.

And maybe she could finally check out that control room she had read about in her book, because she was dying to find out what an actual control room looked like. She liked to think it was some super high-tech place with lots of computers and holograms and (formerly) staffed with people in uniforms who watched everything that went on in the park on huge screens and kept notes in large files.

First, though, she was going to have to learn how to drive.

She closed the boot and scampered back over to the driver’s seat, climbing into it with a little trouble. It hurt like hell to bend her knee so she could touch the pedals she’d spotted, and when she was seated she could only barely see over the steering wheel, but it worked. If barely. A closed the door and, after locating the seat belt, put it on. Then she grabbed the key, mumbled a little prayer to whatever deity was out there, and twisted it.

With a low rumble, the engine sputtered to life.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A learns to drive, and goes to check out the control room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're over the halfway mark now, people - only a few more chapters to go!
> 
> In the meantime, enjoy!

So, apparently, learning to drive wasn’t as easy as A had hoped it to be.

Trial and error showed her which pedals did what and how hard she had to press down to move, and once she finally figured out how to shift gears, she had to practise. A lot. Because experience showed her that ‘press down on the gas and steer so you don’t hit anything’ wasn’t as easy in practise as it sounded in theory.

A was glad that her car was sturdy. It kind of had to be with the amount of times she’d driven into the walls before she’d managed to maneuver into the relative clarity of Main Street. Though, it hadn’t exactly come out of the ordeal unscratched.

A was now the proud owner of a severely dented car without headlights. Well, they were still there, they’d just been sort of crushed and shattered by the walls.

Well, it wasn’t like A had figured out how to turn the headlights on, anyway, so she doubted she was going to miss them very much. Besides, she wasn’t planning on driving anywhere in the dark anyway. The nights would be spent safely tucked away in her hotel suite, away from danger and whatever dinosaurs roamed this hellhole of an island.

A was not stupid enough to go roaming around when the dark would impair her vision even more than it already was.

* * *

 

It took her a week before she felt confident enough to call herself a barely decent driver. Or, at least, she had stopped driving into things.

Either way, progress.

Which was good, because it was about time she went to stock up on food again.

Driving to the storage facilities went so fast A wanted to boggle. Back when she hadn’t been disabled, it had still taken her an hour to walk there. Now that she had a vehicle, it barely took five minutes.

She parked right in front of the building that stored the food, turning off the engine and pulling the keys from the contact out of quickly developing habit. They were quickly tucked into the pocket of her shorts, and then she slid out of the car to retrieve her crate from the boot. While she didn’t need it anymore to drag her food back to her suite, it would come in handy to transport food from storage to her car.

Like last time, she went for the foods that didn’t have to be cooled first. She gathered cardboard trays filled with cans and tins, stacking them into her crate until it towered to her hip; the first five trays consisted solely of sweetened condensed milk, the rest of fruit, soup, veggies, pasta and stews. Then came crackers and cookies and jars of jam and other things like that - A didn’t touch the rice and the dried pasta and such, because she had found out that she was a terrible cook and was better off eating things that didn’t have to be cooked beforehand. Almost everything she ate came straight out of the package - the only cooking she did was heating tins of soup, pasta or stew in the microwave.

Once the boot of the car was filled with trays of cans and boxes, A went to visit the freezers, where she gathered jugs of milk and juice, fresh fruits and cheese as well as some frozen pies and cartons of ice cream. She occasionally liked to indulge.

By the time A was back at her hotel, boot and backseat of the car filled with food, barely an hour and a half had passed, and she was beyond impressed with her vehicle. This thing was going to make her life a hell of a lot easier now that she didn’t have to walk everywhere.

Also, the storage facilities did have fuel storages - she’d checked. Much to A’s satisfaction, there was more fuel stored away than she knew what to do with. She wouldn’t be running out anytime soon, if ever. It was a stroke of luck she hadn't expected, but certainly welcomed.

* * *

 

The control room.

A had wondered what it looked like for ages - ever since she’d found out the island had one. The building itself, made of grey concrete and faintly square-ish against the mountains behind the resort, had been a source of many intrigued questions. It had been way too far for her to walk, though, especially after being attacked.

But with her car, A finally had the chance to go investigate it.

She’d already had her breakfast of condensed milk, canned pears and banana-apple juice, and she’d packed a lunch of tropical fruit cocktail, some apples, a few snack cakes and a carton of milk. Her spears, which were always close when she left her hotel, were in the passenger’s seat, along with her lunchbox, and A was happily bobbing her head to the cd that was stuck in the car.

She wasn’t sure what artist it was, or why it was stuck in her car, but she didn’t know how to turn off the sound system, so music it was. And besides, it was pretty catchy music, and the songs were upbeat, which was all A needed to wiggle (with a little effort, she was driving, after all) along to the beat. If she turned the volume a little low, it didn’t even hurt her head that much.

The drive was a few miles, and it took her maybe ten minutes at a sedate pace. A wasn’t yet confident enough to drive faster than maybe twenty miles an hour, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to either. Twenty was plenty fast enough. It got her where she wanted to go in relatively little time, and it was (probably) a pretty safe speed to stay at. She didn’t want to race at, like, sixty miles an hour and accidentally wrap herself around a tree or something.

Also, sometimes the strain on her leg got too much and she had to take it off the pedals because her knee just wouldn’t keep bending, and when that happened, it was good to drive slowly so she could just let the car roll until it stopped on it’s own.

A parked right in front of the large double doors of the control center - it wasn’t like there was anyone else who had to enter the building, anyway - and made sure the driver’s seat was parallel to the door and the keys were in the contact. Just in case she had to flee. She didn’t want to have to waste time running around the car to get in or to fumble around with the keys if something was chasing her. That would just be a stupid way to die.

She grabbed one of her three spears from the front seat, slinging the small bag containing her lunch box onto her back. She wasn’t sure how long she was going to be inside, so she figured she should take it with her in case her exploration took longer than expected. Besides, she might want a snack at some point. She could definitely use some extra nourishment, anyway.

She still hadn’t regained the weight she’d lost when she’d been sick; her leg and shoulder seemed to have taken up most of her energy when they’d been healing, leaving little for the rest of her body to function off. Or that was what A imagined had happened, anyway, because she knew little to nothing on how stuff worked.

The door, as per usual when A tried it, was unlocked. She was a little surprised with how carelessly people had left the place, but then, when murderous dinosaurs were out and about and killing people, locking doors wasn’t really the biggest priority.

Either way, A was grateful because a) she didn’t know how to pick locks, and b) this particular door looked a little too high-tech to be picked. Mainly because there was no keyhole as far as she could see.

Pushing the door open, A stepped into a lobby of sorts, keeping her spear ready. It was darker inside, because the lights were very low and there were no windows she could see, but not so dark that she couldn’t see anything. Granted, she usually didn’t see a lot anymore, but there was enough light to stop her from tripping or walking into walls.

Across the lobby was an elevator, and A wasted no time getting in and pushing the button for the second (and last, apparently this building only had two floors) floor - the first floor wasn’t as interesting as she had hoped for, being a lobby and all. The elevator played a bland tune that immediately got on her nerves, and A was glad when the doors opened and she could step out.

She glanced around, and found that she’d walked straight into the control room she’d been so insatiably curious about.

And it was awesome.

It was very large, with whole rows of fancy touch-screen computers, all facing the far wall, which was literally a giant screen. Padding over to one of the computers, A leaned her spear against the workspace and sat down in the chair - it was quite comfy. Then, curiously, she tapped at the touch screen in front of her, delighted surprise surging through her when, in an instant, the screen before her and the huge one on the wall lit up.

Grinning, she began tapping random buttons on the screen, watching in fascination as both screens responded with random images and information.

* * *

 

In a skyscraper in New York City, America, a floor was owned by Jurassic World. It had once been used as a back-up center, in case the control room on Isla Nublar had trouble.

After the collapse of the park, most employees of the backup center had been laid off; there were just four people left, who worked in six-hour shifts, to monitor the tracking devices the dimorphodons and pteranodons were tagged with. If one got too far from the island, an ACU team was warned to make sure the flying dino wouldn’t reach the civilized world.

The computers in the backup center, however, were linked to the computers in the control room on Isla Nublar.

In another world, an overworked, tired employee would’ve forgotten to shut down said that link, which would have caused a chain reaction that would’ve seen A rescued from Isla Nublar in short order.

In this world, however, that overworked, tired employee had noticed the link had still been online at the same moment they’d noticed the phones had still been connected, and instead of ignoring it and going home to get some sleep, they’d taken a few extra minutes to fix it.

The link wasn’t shut down completely; for that to happen, the whole system would have had to be rebooted, because it was an important part of the safety procedures. Instead, the employee had simply muted any and all signals the computer might have given off to alert people of something happening in the control room on Isla Nublar, and had then proceeded to forget all about doing it.

In another world, A would’ve been off Isla Nublar an on her way to a hospital within the next 48 hours.

In this world, no one noticed she was messing around in the control room.

In this world, no little red lights started blinking in New York, and nothing started making noise and caught the attention of the employee on shift, and thus no rescue team was sent.

* * *

 

A spent several hours messing around with the computers, watching in delight as the big screen on the wall showed a variation of information, pictures and camera feeds. She even managed to somehow, and completely accidentally, activate a feature that read every word that appeared on the screen out loud, so she didn’t even have to wrestle with reading.

She snacked on her lunch, drank her milk, and learned the island was far bigger than the maps make it seem. There were huge grassy plains with vegetarian dinosaurs that lived in huge herds, and the cameras tucked into the occasional tree or mounted on sturdy metal poles at least twenty feet up gave her a splendid view of the whole thing, all live footage.

There were huge meat eaters that scared A even from on the screen, and underwater cameras in the bay showed a walled-off chunk that had a humongous swimming dinosaur in it, but that one looked far skinnier than it should be and on the verge of starving to death, and there were smaller dinosaurs too, tiny ones and some that were a little larger, and there was a very large bird cage where the flying menaces apparently nested.

A felt a little queasy at the nests, which had eggs in them, and some of them had already hatched, revealing tiny flying menaces. A didn’t like the flying menaces. Just looking at them made her shoulder and leg hurt, even as the memories made her shudder and want to hide under the desk she’d commandeered.

Having figured out the controls for the live feed pretty well by now, A quickly switched away from the cameras in the bird cage, instead tuning back in to the cameras that showed her the valley with the herds of vegetarians. She liked those much better than the flying menaces or the big ones that ate meat and had teeth that could shred her into bloody strips.

Hours had passed by the time A managed to tear herself away from the screens. She was tired, it had been a long and exciting day, and she wanted to go home and get some sleep. But she was definitely coming back here tomorrow, because she had a feeling that watching the live feeds might just become her new favourite thing to do. Only a few hours in, and she was already learning to distinguish individual animals from each other whenever they passed the cameras. It was fun, and educational, and it didn’t involve walking or hard work, so it was pretty much the best thing A had encountered on this island, bar condensed milk and her car.

And her mixing bowl. God, she loved that bowl. Oh, and her cart, she adored that thing too.

Gathering the remains of her packed lunch, A threw the trash into one of the bins on either side of her desk, and slowly limped out of the control room, not bothering to shut the screens and computers down. She was pretty sure they would just keep running anyway. Besides, she was planning on coming back tomorrow, so there was no harm in not shutting them down.

A took the elevator down to the lobby and made sure to look around and determine if it was safe before she left the building, and then she hobbled the few feet to her car as fast her she could go with her busted leg. The car door slammed shut behind her, and she felt a little safer with steel and glass between her and the rest of the island. Steel and glass probably wasn’t enough to stop the huge meat eating ones, or even the claws that jumped, the ones from her nightmares, but it was something, at least.

She drove back to her hotel slowly, looking at the island with whole new eyes. The road was bordered by forest on both sides, huge trees that towered dozens of feet into the air and thick ferns that obscured sight and bright tropical flowers that looked like tiny oases of colour between all the green and brown, and it made A feel simultaneously curious and wary about what kind of dinosaurs would live in the forest surrounding the road.

Not curious enough to go investigate, though - one near-deadly experience with a dinosaur was enough for the rest of her probably short life, thank you. She was not stupid enough to go seek out more of them. She’d just observe them from the huge screens in the control room, and that was about as close as she was willing to get to a real dinosaur.

A arrived home in short order, and hobbled into her hotel quickly, taking the elevator up to the third floor. It wasn’t yet dark out, but it was at the point where the sky went pink and orange as the sun began to set, and A was even less comfortable being outside when it began to turn towards evening than she was at midday. Also, she was hungry, and she could really go for some dinner right about now.

She rummaged through her stack of ready-to-eat meals that would only have to be heated, and picked out a can of bbq pulled pork and beans, as well as a can of bread. A hadn’t previously known bread also came in cans, because in her cartoons it always came in loafs or in slices, but she’d found a few dozens trays of it on her last food run and taken some cans with her, and it proved to be pretty good.

She popped her pork into the microwave to heat and pulled the bread from the can, slicing it with a sharp knife and tossing the slices into the toaster she’d found in the staff rooms of the hotel to crisp it. Once her pork and beans were hot, she poured them into a deep dish, piling her slices of toasted bread into another plate, and made her way into her living room, only pausing to grab a fork, some painkillers and a bottle of raspberry pop.

She settled into her comfy chair, placing her food on the small table next to it, and grabbed the tv remote, which was conveniently also on the small table. Once the tv was switched on and set to a random cartoon channel, A took a few moments to unbuckle and remove her brace, and couldn’t quite suppress the groan of relief when it was off. That thing hurt to wear, even though she needed it to walk, and it was bliss whenever she got to take it off for a while, if only because the pressure it put on her leg sometimes made it feel as bad as it had been just after she’d broken it for the second time.

She grabbed the fabric of her pants to lift her leg onto the low, padded stool she had in front of her chair for just that reason, making sure her foot rested in such a way that it didn’t put extra pressure on her ankle and knee, and then grabbed her fork and plate, swallowing down her painkillers and digging into her meal hungrily, her full attention on the cartoon playing on the tv. It was a rerun of Phineas and Ferb, one she’d already seen several times, but she didn’t mind, because it was one of A’s favourite shows.

She ate slowly, trying not to burn her mouth on the hot food, and already couldn't wait to get back in the control room.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A picks up a hobby or two, finds herself some toys at one of the shops, makes it through a storm, and has to deal with the aftermath of said storm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Update!

Time passed.

A spent most of her days at the control room, spending hours upon hours nestled into a comfy seat she’d built out of wood, pillows, and blankets as she watched her personal reality tv show. She spent so much time there that she’d dropped by the supply depot to pick up a couple of trays of food and drinks to keep at the control room, so she wouldn’t have to pack a lunch every day, or for if she wanted to spend the night at the control room.

The latter was something she’d done only once, and she doubted she would do it a second time, because the control room was dark at night, and the light of the screen made odd shadows dance on the walls and they scared A straight into nightmares. She much preferred her own bed at her hotel, which felt a lot safer than the control room did.

Either way, she easily spent six hours a day watching the live feeds. Because it was live, none of the images ever repeated themselves, and that was what made it entertaining.

She’d also taken up a few hobbies. She’d started drawing, which was enjoyable, but she mostly did it in an attempt to train the dexterity of her hands. Her left hand sometimes didn’t work right, probably because of the damage done to her arm and shoulder, and she sometimes had trouble with her right hand too - A suspected it had something to do with how hard she’d hit her head when the flying menace had attacked her.

She was working at it hard, because she wanted to get back to the point where her hands didn’t constantly shake, and where her fingers wouldn’t just stop working randomly and make her drop everything she was holding. Her hotel room had way too many stains in the carpet from where her fingers had locked up and she’d accidentally dropped whatever food or drinks she had been holding at the time. (The fact that her left arm still randomly spasmed (pretty severely, at times she’d involuntarily pitch whatever she was holding across the room because she couldn’t control her limb) probably didn’t help with the mess.)

For the same reason, A had started keeping a journal, because the writing, though slow-going and barely legible, helped her train her hands, and it also did wonders for her reading comprehension, even though the concentration it took gave her screaming headaches.

She’d wanted to take up something like woodcarving, but A honestly didn’t trust her hands with a sharp knife - she might accidentally cut off her own fingers or something like that if her arm started seizing or her hands shook too badly. So, instead of woodcarving, she wrote, and she drew. She’d even risked a trip to the souvenir store, where there were plenty of Jurassic World-themed notebooks and sketch pads for her to loot, as well as pens, markers, pencils, erasers and pencil sharpeners. A had made sure to take enough to fill up her trusty crate, which should last her a good while.

She made another food trip somewhere along the way, taking her usual five trays of condensed milk along with the rest of the food, and a few extra trays of bread in a can, because she liked it and it was delicious when toasted and slathered with chocolate spread and raspberry jam. At the same time, that is, because A had pretty much said ‘fuck it’ to healthy eating, since she was going to die here anyway - might as well eat whatever she wanted.

Her life expectancy wasn’t exactly high, after all, so it didn’t matter what kind of junk she stuffed her face with, because she was probably going to be dead before the absolute mess she called food could kill her. So she was absolutely going to eat canned banana bread with chocolate spread and raspberry jam slathered on top of it, and she was absolutely going to eat inhuman amounts of chicken ravioli in cream sauce with way too much cheese grated over the top, and she was definitely going to eat all the ice cream with huge slices of cake and pie on the side and whipped cream on top.

Somehow she managed to remain skinny, even with all the food she ate - she could probably still be classified on the edge of underweight, but A had little to no concept of weight and size, so all she noticed of that was that she could just barely count her ribs and didn’t seem to put on a lot of fat so she couldn’t count her ribs, no matter how much and how often she ate.

* * *

 

A started at the sketch she’d drawn critically, and then at the paused image on the tv. She’d attempted to draw Shego, who was her favourite character from Kim Possible, but she wasn’t very good at drawing yet, so it didn’t really look as good as she’d hoped for. And her hand hurt from the effort it had taken to make the pencils do what she wanted.

She could work reasonably well with the computers at the control room, because those were touch screens, and all she had to do was poke at stuff with her index finger. She could work with cans of food and bottles of drink, because they had a large diameter that she could curl her fingers around and squeeze until her hand locked and she had to use some force to make her hand let go again.

Pencils... pencils were thin and small and breakable, and the combination of holding them, of making her fingers wrap around something so small, not locking her fingers to make sure the pencil didn’t break under the pressure, and moving it in such a way she didn’t snap off the point on her paper and actually produced lines while trying not to drop it or have her shaking hand accidentally toss it aside, well, it was a lot harder than it sounded.

Which was why her drawing was, to be quite honest, terrible. If it weren’t for the green and black she’d used to colour it, it wouldn’t even be obvious which character it was supposed to be. She could’ve given it blond hair and called it Ron instead of Shego.

Still, she had drawn something fairly legible, and that was a little victory in itself, because that was something that didn’t happen often, even though she’d been drawing almost daily for several weeks now. So, even though the drawing was a disaster, A felt a little proud of herself anyway.

Laying the paper aside, she finally dropped her pencil and spent a few minutes slowly stretching out her hand, grimacing at the little zaps of pain that shot up her wrist at the action. They were followed by a sense of dullness through her whole hand, and then pins and needles. Lots of pins and needles. Like a hive of bees had decided to go live under her skin. It hurt, but over the past few weeks A had grown used to her hand hurting constantly from the strain she put it through, and she’d stopped crying at it over two weeks ago.

Once she was done stretching her hand, A quickly cleared away her drawing supplies and went to get some lunch of condensed milk, tinned pears and strawberry cheesecake cookies. She didn’t know how to read the time, but she could look out of her window and see where in the sky the sun was, and it was just past the middle at the moment, and that meant the day was half over and it was time for lunch.

A liked it when it was time for lunch.

She usually ate whenever she was hungry, but she took breakfast, lunch, and dinner seriously anyway, if only to give herself a routine. That was important, because she didn’t sleep eighteen hours a day anymore, and if it weren’t for the daily tally she added to her wall and the three meals a day, she probably would’ve lost all sense of time by now.

Not that the tallies helped with figuring out how long she’d been stuck on Isla Nublar, because A wasn’t very good at counting and had given up around the seventy-fourth tally. She just classified them as ‘a lot’ nowadays.

A ate slowly, not seeing the point in rushing, and tried to decide what to do after lunch. Maybe she could go explore some more. When she’d looted the souvenir store for drawing and writing supplies, she’d noticed it had toys too. A didn’t have any toys. She wanted some, though. And she knew the store had dinosaur action figures, as well as boxes of something called Lego, which, from the small glimpse she’d gotten of it, looked fun.

Well, that was a plan then.

A finished her lunch and tossed her empty cans into the trash, dumping the fork she’d used in the plastic bowl she kept her dirty dishes in until it was dishwashing day. Dishwashing day wasn’t until three more tallies on her wall, but since she used relatively little plates and stuff, there wasn’t a lot yet, so if she wanted to she could postpone it a few more tallies. Or until it started smelling.

She gathered her crate on wheels and two of her spears, and tucked an extra knife into the waistband of her shorts, and slowly hobbled her way out of her suite. After a quick scan of the sky and the skyline of all the buildings she could see to make sure there weren’t any flying menaces around, A pulled her little crate out of the hotel and set out for the souvenir shop.

It was close to her hotel, only half a dozen buildings over, and even with her disabled leg, it only took her a minute or two to get there.

The inside of the store was chaotic, and not because A had been rooting through it a few weeks earlier. She was pretty sure people had tried to hide here before everyone had been evacuated and she’d been left behind, and that was probably why it was such a mess.

A pulled her crate behind her as she began to inspect the various toys on offer for something that looked interesting. She took two of the boxes called Lego, which seemed to be a sort of building blocks to make dinosaurs with, as well as dinosaur action figures (everything they had was dinosaur-themed), a tiny toy excavation set, and something shaped like tiny dinosaur eggs that, according to the back of the box, she was supposed to put in some water, and then it would grow tiny dinosaurs.

A wasn’t sure what kind of magic could grow dinosaurs from water, but she was intrigued enough to try it.

Her crate piled full with boxes, A took a last cursory look around the store, and, on a whim, decided to take a stuffed dinosaur as well. Sometimes her bed was too big and empty, and she wanted something other than her pillow to hold on to when she was scared and lonely or when the painkillers for her leg didn’t work and she was in too much pain to sleep.

A didn’t like the meat eating ones, so she chose a stuffed vegetarian with three horns and a shield behind it’s head. It was as big as her torso, a soft blue in colour, and soft and fluffy to the touch, and A instantly loved it. She tucked it under her bad arm, deciding to call it Three, because it had three horns, and then decided that Three was male, just because.

Then, having gotten the toys she’d wanted, A decided to get back to her hotel post-haste, because she didn’t want to spend any more time out in the open than absolutely necessary. She hobbled back home as fast as her leg could take her, scrambling through the barrier with some effort, and then taking the elevator up to the third floor. A hadn’t used the stairs in ages, mostly because she couldn’t bend her jacked-up knee enough to climb them. It was a small miracle she could bend her knee enough to drive, she didn’t even want to think of how much it would hurt if she had to climb the stairs.

* * *

 

Three was a godsend.

It stormed, less than a month after she’d gotten him, worse than A had ever experienced.

Huddled under the covers of her bed, Three clutched against her chest with all her might, A had her eyes clenched shut as tightly as she could, even as she buried her head under one of her pillows and tried to stop the terrified tears from leaking into the covers.

Outside, the wind howled like an angry god, ripping trees straight from the ground and blowing apart crumbling buildings with the sound of shrieking stone. It hailed instead of raining, and if it weren’t for the wood A had used to board up the windows when she’d realized the weather was going to turn, the hailstones would’ve smashed straight through the glass.

The cracks where the wood and the outside of her building met lit up with bluish-white lightning every few seconds, and even with how little of the light crept through the cracks, it was enough to light A’s bedroom up every few seconds as well. It was followed, always, with thunder so loud it made her teeth rattle and her ears hurt, sounding like the sky was splitting in half.

Three was meagre comfort, but comfort nonetheless. A clutched him close, trying not to sob in terror, and let herself imagine that Three was alive and a lot bigger, big enough to stand between her and the thunder and make everything okay again.

* * *

 

Her hotel had taken damage.

It was pretty severe.

A stared up at what she could see of the roof from where she was standing, across the street from her hotel, trying not to panic at the fact that, you know, the roof she was looking at was less than it should be. She didn’t know where the rest of it was, but it sure as hell wasn’t attached to her hotel anymore.

Also, she was suddenly really glad she’d boarded up her windows when she’d realized a storm was blowing in, because they were still intact while over half of the other windows had been shattered sometime during the four days the storm had raged across Isla Nublar.

The roof was more pressing than the broken windows in other suites of her hotel, though. A’s suite was on the third floor, and there was a fourth floor above her, but she didn’t like the thought of the roof being damaged. A didn’t know a lot about things like these, but she was pretty sure the roof was important.

Well.

It looked like she was going to have to do a lot of fixing in the next couple of weeks.

She briefly thought about finding a different building to live in, but dismissed the thought almost immediately. This hotel, damaged and crumbling as it was, was the only home she knew. It had her tallies on the wall, and her room full of fridges, and her huge bed, and the chair she liked so much, and a special spot for her beloved mixing bowl and crate. She couldn’t just leave it behind, not when this was the only home she remembered.

And the only other option was fixing up her hotel until it was liveable again.

A sighed, already feeling tired just thinking about it. It was going to be a lot of work. And she was going to have to scrounge together the materials, too, which was probably going to be a hell of a chore as well. It wasn’t like she just had lumber and stuff lying around, after all. She was going to have to forage it from other building, or go into the forest to chop down a tree.

At least she had a hammer and more nails than she knew what to do with. That was a start. And she knew that there were axes in her hotel, she’d seen the bright red boxes on the wall with yellow and black stripes on the inside and glass in front of the axe, with a sign under it that said to use it in an emergency.

She could use those to go chop down a tree if she really had no other choice. And then she could use her car to drag the tree into the resort and to her hotel, where she could then somehow find a way to turn it into lumber to fix the roof with.

Yeah.

That was a plan.

But first she was going to see if she could find materials the easy way. Best to start close, A decided as she looked around. The storm had pretty much torn apart one of the more damaged restaurants, and she could see some ends of wood sticking out of the piles of rubble. Maybe if she used her car, she could pull the wood loose from the rubble to see if it would be of any use to her.

A trudged over to her car, wondering, if the wood was good to use, how the hell she was going to get it up to the roof. And, also important, how the hell she was going to get herself up there without falling off and hurting herself or even dying.

Because that would be bad.

* * *

 

Okay, so she was going to have to chop down a few trees. She’d found some usable lumber, but not a lot, and not nearly enough to fix the roof.

And she was going to need lumber to build a scaffold, because she needed a way to get up to the roof and keep building supplies up there, and for that she needed wood as well. It didn’t need to be four stories high, thankfully, because she was planning to build it on the fourth floor where the roof had been torn off, mostly for convenience, and also because it would save her a lot of work.

A had already retrieved one of the emergency axes, which, according to the instructions, were meant to be used to break down doors in case of a fire. She luckily hadn’t been forced to deal with fire yet, but the axes came in handy anyway.

It was a bit big for her, and a little heavy, but A had dealt with worse things than an axe, so it wasn’t too much trouble for her. She dropped it into the passenger’s seat of her car, which also had her spear and some food already there, and drove in the direction of the road that led to the food storages. There were plenty of trees small enough for her to be able to fell and yet strong enough to serve as part of a scaffold or a new roof. And since her car had a tow hook at the back and a coil of towing rope in the boot, A could easily transport the felled trees back to her hotel.

She drove slowly so she could get a good look at the trees, and then finally spotted one that looked like she could work with it.

A quickly stopped the car and grabbed her axe before sliding out of the driver’s seat to inspect the tree a little more closely. It was far taller than her, and if she had to guess, it was about six inches thick, so it should be plenty strong as either building material or as part of a scaffold.

Nodding to herself, A hefted her axe, and got to work.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> BLUE!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Third last chapter!

She was not cut out to be a lumberjack.

At all.

Her arm and shoulder had not hurt this much since just after the flying menace had tried to eat her. Those smouldering coals were back, and they were back with a vengeance.

A was popping pain pills by the handful, and still it wasn’t helping enough to make it go away. Granted, she usually popped pain pills by the handful, because nowadays when she didn’t take them every few hours, she’d start craving for them like nothing else, and then she’d start getting jittery and sweaty and everything would ache, and it wouldn’t stop until she took another dose, but still.

The amount she was taking usually took the edge of at least, but right now, the pills weren’t helping.

So, because A had no real concept of addiction or overdoses, she decided to up her game, and went for the pills that always made her a little loopy and very sleepy when she took them. Usually, one was enough to knock her out, but she was in pain and she wanted it to stop, so she took three.

She passed out less than ten minutes later, but the pain was most certainly gone, so when she woke up, she didn’t really care she’d been unconscious for pretty much most of the day.

* * *

 

The heavier pills were great. She’d driven to the supply storages especially for the purpose of getting more of them, and she now had a fairly large supply of heavy-duty opioids piled next to her trays of condensed milk.

As A had no idea that those kinds of drugs were usually prescribed by doctors, and that they were only on Isla Nublar because there had been an on-site doctor and basic hospital for accidents and such, she had no clue that those drugs were of the highly addicting kind. More addicting than the ones she’d already been taking, anyway.

So when she started craving them like she did the usual pain pills only a few days after starting to take them regularly, she thought nothing strange of it and just continued on with her work, the idea of addiction never even crossing her mind. She actually didn’t know what addiction was, or that it even existed. All she knew was that the new pills did a reasonable job at making the pain go away for at least a little while, and that they made her feel funny (the good kind of funny, like, warm and glowy and floaty) while they did so.

She did notice that she was a little clumsier when she took them, but she didn’t pay much attention to that either, instead just making sure she was a little more careful with driving or working with her axe while she cut down trees for her repairs.

Like so many things, the idea that operating a car or using dangerous tools like axes while stoned out of her mind on restricted drugs was a bad idea also never occurred to A, so she happily went on her merry little way, (almost) pain-free for the first time in far too long.

* * *

 

Repairing a roof was difficult. Very difficult.

It had taken A a solid two weeks to even get her scaffolding set up on the fourth floor, and another three to chop down enough trees and convert them to lumber to fix the roof with.

The tree-to-lumber trick had taken a few days to figure out, but A had discovered that if she chopped a thin line down the length of a tree and then stuck little wooden blocks shaped like thin slices of pie in the crack, and then smacked on the inserts with a hammer, the tree would split down the line into long, flat lengths of rough but usable lumber.

She spent a solid week just doing that, and ended up with a considerable pile of quite usable wooden planks.

From there, it took her three days to figure out how to get them to the fourth floor, because they didn’t fit in the elevator and she couldn’t exactly climb the stairs with her bad leg. In the end, she managed to attach an extra segment to her scaffolding, which rose out of the roof and then horizontally over the edge of the roof, to which she added a blunt, bent piece of metal in lieu of a hook. She then threw a long piece of towing rope over the hook, attached a bundle of lumber to one end, and tied the other end to her car, and then she used her car to tow the wood up to the fourth floor.

It was all very efficient.

A was kind of proud of herself for that little bit of ingeniousness. It was clever engineering indeed, if she had to say so herself.

Either way, in total, it took nearly six weeks of preparation before she was even ready to start fixing the roof, and it was definitely necessary. It had rained several times, and with no roof to keep out the water, the floor of the fourth floor had started leaking, which meant A was currently battling a leaky ceiling.

But she was going to take care of that; she had lumber, she had scaffolding to get up to the roof, she had a good hammer and a shit ton of nails, she had a rope harness to make sure she couldn’t fall off the roof and be smashed into a paste on the pavement, and she had more than enough heavy drugs to ensure she could work through the perpetual pain in her leg, arm and shoulder - she could do this.

It was time to finally get started on the real work.

* * *

 

A squinted at the row of glasses, close enough that she could see them clearly.

They were settled in her windowsill, filled almost to the top, and at the bottom of each glass was a small, colourful egg.

She’d finally opened her ‘grow your own dinosaur’ magic kits, and so far, they weren’t doing much. Maybe the magic had an expiration date. Maybe it needed a spell, or a ritual of some sort. A didn’t know. She didn’t know anything about magic.

Sighing, she decided to give the eggs some time, in case they still worked but just took a little while to get going. It wasn’t like she used those glasses much anyway, if at all. But she didn’t feel like sitting there and staring at them until they did something, so A grabbed Three and returned to her game of dinosaur action figures.

It was getting pretty intense; Fred and Raoul the vegetarian headbutt dinos were being chased by Maximilio the meat eater, and they were running out of places to hide, but Xerxes the really long necked vegetarian dino was close, and if they teamed up, they might be able to defeat Maximilio without being eaten.

Since A was making it up as she went, even she didn’t know what the end was going to be like, and she was eager to find out what it was going to be. Was she going to let Maximilio win? Or were Fred and Raoul about to be saved by Xerxes? She wasn’t sure yet.

Taking a drink from her bottle of pop, A picked up Fred and Raoul and started moving them in the direction of the rocky outcrop, which was really a pile of books, so they could hide and plan their escape from Maximilio, who was in hot pursuit and about to catch up to them.

Rest days were fun.

* * *

 

So, the new roof had ended up pretty decent.

It had taken a while, and A had taken a few break days throughout the process to rest her arm, shoulder, and leg, but finally, she had finished.

The roof was fixed.

It had taken two weeks on top of the six-week preparation period, and though it didn’t look pretty and it wasn’t completely waterproof, at least there were no more puddles on the fourth floor to soak through A’s ceiling.

All in all, A was pretty pleased with the results.

She was even more pleased that she still had half a dozen lengths of lumber left. Those could come in handy if she ever had another situation where something had to be fixed up. Storms were regular on Isla Nublar, A was pretty sure something other than the roof was going to be in need of repair at some point.

She just hoped it wouldn’t be her windows. They’d stayed whole so far, and she’d prefer to keep it that way, because she didn’t have any spare windows to replace them if they broke. And she didn’t want to simply board them up, because she liked to have daylight during the day, and some moonlight during the night, so her suite wasn’t so pitch black and scary when she was trying to sleep.

But that was a matter for another day.

Right now, the important thing was to move her lumber inside, so it wouldn’t get ruined. She’d left it outside during construction, for convenience with the lifting and stuff, but since the work was done, she was going to move it into the lobby of her hotel so the rain and stuff wouldn’t ruin the wood. It would be a pity to see her hard work going to waste.

It was hard work, though; the planks were long and heavy, and because of her jacked-up shoulder, A had trouble with carrying heavy weights. But she couldn’t exactly pull the lumber into her hotel with her car, because her car was too big and wouldn't be able to fit through the doors, which meant she had to do it with good old muscle strength.

Which A didn’t possess a whole lot of, unfortunately.

Needless to say, it was a slow and laborious process.

A was halfway through trying to drag a length of wood into her hotel when she happened to look up - and instead of the building across the street, she met a set of yellow, reptilian eyes.

She froze on the spot, breath stuttering in her lungs, sudden terror making her heart pound like a jackhammer.

This one was a meat eater. A had seen holograms of it at the innovation center. The name had been too long and difficult for her to read, but she knew that it was also called ‘raptor’ for short.

It was bigger than her, bipedal, with humongous sharp claws on the feet and a mouth filled with way too many way too sharp teeth. It had blue stripes down its head and sides, and the eyes showed a feral kind of intelligence that terrified A even more than the claws and teeth did, because she knew, deep in her bones, that this thing was smart, and there was nothing A could think of that was more dangerous than an intelligent predator.

This thing was in a wholly different league than the flying menaces. This thing was one that wouldn’t just mindlessly attack, it would wait and plan and stalk and only strike when it knew it had no chance of botching the job.

A knew, instinctively, that she had no chance if this thing decided to eat her.

She could maybe fight off another flying menace if she had her spear on hand, but against this thing, she would, without a doubt, end up dead and gutted in a matter of seconds.

A prayed, desperately, to a God she didn’t remember, that the raptor wouldn’t attack. She’d thought she was okay with the fact that she was probably not going to last long on this island, but now that she was looking death in the eye, she desperately wanted to live.

A swallowed hard, wishing to al that was holy that her spear was within arm’s reach. How could she have been stupid enough to leave it leaning next to the hotel’s doors? She should’ve kept it on her at all times.

The raptor cocked it’s head, giving out a low chittering sound. It’s nails clicked against the concrete, and it was all A could do not to whimper or burst into terrified tears when the dino slowly clicked it’s way closer to her. Close enough to touch. She could feel and smell it’s breath on her face - it was hot, and it smelled of old blood and rot. Of death. She wanted to gag, but she was too frozen with fear to move. She could barely breathe. The headaches that had slowly - finally - started to fade returned with a vengeance, a migraine from hell taking up a very painful rhythm behind her eyes and in her skull.

She clenched her eyes shut, pulse hammering in her throat, trying her best not to think of the teeth so close to her face. The raptor was sniffing at her. She could hear it inhale, followed by an exhale of rancid breath on her face.

It made another sound, less of a chitter and more of a low chirp, or maybe a purring kind of noise. A wondered why she wasn’t dead yet. She was easy prey, she could barely walk and had no way to defend herself - why wasn’t she being attacked right now?

Very, slowly, she dared open her eyes.

About two inches from her nose was a mouth full of teeth as big as her fingers. She couldn’t quite stop the terrified whimper.

The raptor moved back a bit, cocking its head. It looked as if it were curious. A didn’t know animals could express curiosity. She didn’t really care either. She was too scared to give a damn about whether animals could feel emotions or not.

The raptor gave an inquisitive-sounding warble as it stared at her with those unnerving yellow eyes. Finally, after a small eternity during which A was pretty sure her heart had given out at least three times before starting up again, the raptor seemed to lose interest in her.

Shaking it’s head, it took a few steps back, and then turned and loped off.

For a few seconds, A remained frozen where she was. Then the relief hit her, and her legs gave out.

She flopped to the ground bonelessly, barely aware of the jolt of pain her leg gave, and just spent a while lying there, staring at the sky and trying to wrap her head around the fact she was still alive.

She managed to get her shaking limbs working again after what felt like an hour, stumbling into the elevator and then her room, completely forgetting about the lumber. She unbuckled her brace and crawled under the covers of her bed, and then it all kind of came crashing down on her and she proceeded to have a pretty intense panic attack.

Once it was over, she downed four of the heavy pills and gratefully let the pills drag her into blissful unconsciousness.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A has more fixing to do, and she spends time with Blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a bit of a filler chapter, to be honest, and not a very long one either. The style is more choppy than I would honestly like, so I can't say I'm totally happy with it, but meh. It's an update, at least.

A was starting to notice some… oddities. In her mind. Like, her brain did things, and then everything was off.

Sometimes, it felt like she wasn’t all there. Like, her body moved and did what needed to be done, but it was like she was not part of it. It was like looking down on her body from a great height, or like she was stuck in a fuzzy dream - like the world wasn’t real. And sometimes, she sat down, and something went wrong in her brain, and then she blinked and suddenly hours had passed and she didn’t remember anything of it.

It was a little scary, to be losing time like that. A had tried taking her pills to make it stop, but the heavy ones only made it worse. That posed a problem, though - her episodes, as she had come to call them, scared her, but she couldn’t go without her pills.

Especially the heavy ones. She needed the heavy ones.

She had tried to go without, but it hadn’t done anything besides make her miserable. She’d lasted only a few hours without her pills, and then she’d taken more than she usually did and passed out for several hours.

So, quitting her pills was a no-go - she couldn’t find it in herself to push that through.

A honestly wasn’t sure what to do now. It wasn’t like she could cobble together a brace for her mind like she had done for her leg. She couldn’t make spear and poke at it until it went away. This wasn’t something she could fix with lumber and inventive engineering.

A was stuck, and she didn’t like it at all.

* * *

 

The raptor kept coming back.

It was nerve-wracking.

A was back to being locked in her hotel, because she was too afraid to go out with that thing roaming around the resort. She spotted it regularly; at least once every couple of days, and sometimes even a couple of days in a row. It didn’t stay long, and it didn’t really do much besides sniff around and lope around in front of her hotel, but A didn’t like it at all. She didn’t want an apex predator this close to herself.

She couldn’t do a lot about it, though, because A wasn’t stupid enough to go pick a fight with a raptor. As long as it didn’t try to attack her, she supposed she could learn to live with it.

* * *

 

It was time for another food run. A was glad for it; she was close to running out of condensed milk. She honestly didn’t know what she would do if she didn’t have any of her favourite food in the world.

Luckily, there was plenty more at the food storages. There were at least a couple dozen trays of the stuff left, which would last A a good while still. And that was after she’d piled four trays into the boot of her car.

She also had four trays of canned bread, double that of different varieties of tinned fruits, lots of cookies and snack cakes and chips, a generous amount of chocolate and sweets, bottles of lemonade and pop, and applesauce. Lots and lots of applesauce.

A had lost interest in the frozen stuff long ago, only going into the freezer to grab juice and milk. She also made a trip into the medicine storages, carrying armfuls of medication into the backseat of her car, all piled into her crate. She still had plenty at the hotel, but A did not want to end up running out of pills. Last time she’d tried not to take any had been miserable. She didn’t want to go through that again - especially if she couldn't get some without having to drive all the way to the storages. She probably wouldn't even reach the storages - if she didn't take her pills, her hands shook way too much and she felt too sick to be able to drive.

Best to stock up now, so she wouldn't have to suffer later.

She was about to step into her car and drive off when she couldn’t help but think of the raptor and how it spent so much time at her resort. Surely it couldn’t hunt very much if it spent most of its time lurking.

A stood next to her car, warring with herself for several minutes, until she sighed, and, cursing herself, trudged back into the freezers to retrieve some meat. There were some nice large pieces of ribs and steak, and she piled a plastic crate full with it to feed the resident apex predator with.

Damn her conscience for making her feel guilty for something that wasn’t her fault.

She just hoped this wouldn’t be the thing that finally got her killed.

* * *

 

So, she accidentally broke one of her windows.

Yeah, A wasn’t happy about that.

She’d quite happily been having breakfast when her bad arm had suddenly seized violently, and next thing she knew her tin of peaches had gone flying through the glass of her living room window.

Well, A thought morosely as she grabbed her seizing arm with her good hand and pressed it against her side as firmly as she could, biting her lip to stop herself from crying out at the sharp jolts of pain in her shoulder, it looked like saving that lumber had been a good idea. She was going to need it to board up the window.

And maybe she should look into making a brace for her shoulder as well, because this just wasn’t doable anymore. She needed something to support her arm before the seizing became even more frequent - and more painful. It hurt enough as it was, she didn't want it to get any worse.

It took several minutes for the painful spasming to stop, by which time A had bruised herself with how hard she’d been restraining herself. She might have to make some sort of strap, she decided as she gingerly rotated her shoulder and tried not to wince, for when this sort of thing happened, so she could just tie her arm to her side and be done with it. She glanced at her arm, and then at the window, and decided that a brace for her arm was more pressing than fixing her window was. She still had the wooden framework in front of it that kept the flying menaces out, so really, all that could happen was that it rained and her windowsill got damp.

Once the shooting pains in her arm died down, A quickly downed one of her heavy pills, and then got to work. A rigid brace probably wasn’t practical, since she had to be able to use her arm, but maybe something padded and semi-movable would work. She was pretty sure she had enough fabric and padding lying around somewhere, and if not, well, she could improvise.

That was pretty much all she’d been doing since she’d woken up under the rubble, after all.

A was good at improvising on the fly to fix things she really shouldn’t have to deal with.

* * *

 

She’d decided to call the raptor Blue, for the markings it had on it’s head and back.

Blue seemed to have become a regular fixture at the resort, and since A had taken to feeding it (him? Her? Fuck it, A was going to call it a ‘her’ from now on.), Blue appeared every day without fail. This meant that A had some meat ready every day as well, which meant she now had to drive to the food storages twice-weekly to make sure she didn’t run out, but it was a chore she didn’t really mind. Feeding Blue had apparently put her firmly in the ‘do not attack’-category in the raptor’s mind, which was all A really wanted. If she had to make regular trips to stay safe, then so be it.

Which was why she didn’t feel worried when Blue showed up while she was sawing lumber to finally board up her window.

A heard the clicking of Blue’s claws against the concrete first, followed by the warbling noise that she’d come to associate with a greeting. She didn’t return the greeting, because she hated to hear the slur in her words when she spoke and thus only did it when it was to curse or something like that, but that was okay, because it wasn’t like she could have a conversation with a wild animal anyway.

Instead, she dragged the portable cooler she’d found on one of her explorations closer and opened it, hefting out the meat she’d put in it when she’d woken up that morning.

Since she now fed a hungry dinosaur, two of her fridges in her pantry room had been converted into meat coolers, which she refilled with easily forty or fifty pounds of meat a piece every couple of days. It wasn’t enough to keep Blue completely fed, she knew that, but the raptor hunted to get the sustenance she needed beyond what A fed her, so A wasn’t worried about that.

Today’s meat was a hunk of what A was pretty sure was shoulder of beef, big enough that she needed two hands to lift it. Blue’s eyes fixed on it the moment it came into view.

If A hadn’t gotten so used to her daily visitor, she’d have been terrified at the intensity of the look. As it was, she just dropped the meat in front of Blue, and went back to sawing off her lumber at the correct length. It was slow going, because her new brace meant that her left arm was more useless than it usually was, and though A was right-handed, her left was occasionally needed as well. She doubted she was going to be able to finish her window today.

Ignoring the sounds of Blue ripping into her meal behind her, A finished sawing off the piece of lumber, and then used it as an example to measure out the rest of the wood she would need. Not for the first time, she cursed whoever had decided to make her hotel with huge windows; it was going to take her most of the day just to saw off enough lumber, let alone to build the frame and finish the board, and then she was going to have to put it in place in such a way that she could either easily remove and replace it at will, or open it like a door.

It was a project that was probably going to take her a couple of days. Oh well. It wasn’t like she had anything better to do, anyway, so what did it really matter if it took a little while? It wasn’t like A had anywhere pressing to be, considering she was pretty much stuck on this island and would probably die here as well.

* * *

 

The big swimming meat eater had died.

It wasn’t hard to notice, considering there was a humongous dead body suddenly floating in the bay. It stank to high heaven, too, but A had the luck that her hotel was downwind most of the time, so she didn’t notice much of that.

In fact, there really were no downsides to the huge swimming monster being dead. As far as A could see, there were only upsides to it.

First of all, one of the scary meat eating ones had kicked the bucket - that was one less thing that could murder her.

Secondly, if she wanted to, she could now go swimming. A had absolutely no intention of doing so, because she was pretty sure she didn’t actually know how to swim, but it was a nice thought nonetheless.

Thirdly, the thing had died very close to the small stage at the aquatheater - close enough for A to jam a spear into it and tie it to the stage with a rope. And the beast was so huge it was level with the stage, which meant easy access for Blue to eat from it, and less trips to the food storages for A.

It was a win-win situation.

Blue got fed, and A didn’t have to exert herself for it anymore. Which was great - the constant driving was hell on her leg and her shoulder. The less she had to do it, the better.

That thing dying was probably the best thing to happen to her in a long time.

And if that wasn’t both sad and a little horrifying, A didn’t know what was.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A's health is starting to decline rapidly, but at least Blue is there to keep her company. A new flying thingy arrives, and it's not one of the flying menaces that constantly try to kill her - Blue takes care of those for her, after all, and her pet dinosaur doesn't seem all that interested in the new flying thingy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The grand finale! Or, at least, the pretty passable finale!
> 
> I've had some trouble trying to figure out how to end this, but I think I've managed. It's a little rushed, and more choppy than I would like, but it'll do.
> 
> Anyways, enjoy!

She woke up feeling absolutely wretched. Like, worse than she had felt in at least several weeks.

A groaned quietly, wincing when it sent spasms of pain through her head, the fabric of the carpet feeling coarse against her cheek. When had she laid down? She couldn’t quite remember. Maybe she’d passed out? Yeah, she’d probably passed out. Why, though?

A very slowly pushed herself up on her elbows, trying not to throw up when her stomach rolled dangerously at the movement. Her whole body felt sore, and she was cold, and she was hungry and nauseous at the same time, and her leg and shoulder were on fire, and how the hell had she gotten to feel so miserable?

She slowly managed to wrestle herself to her feet, and proceeded to sway dangerously for several moments as she tried not to fall over.

Then, taking wobbly steps, she managed to find her way into her pantry room, where she immediately downed a whole bottle of water in a single gulp. She was parched. And her head was still screaming at her. Tossing the empty bottle aside, A looked around to see if she could find the cause for her current condition.

Her eye fell on one of the bottles of heavy pills.

Realization hit.

Of course. She’d had a bad day, and she’d been cranky and in pain and just done with it all, and instead of two pills, she’d taken almost eight of them. Her memory was pretty much blank after that. Which probably coincided with the time she’d passed out. And that wasn’t a surprise either, because A had never taken so many of her heavy pills at the same time before.

Before… whenever it had been she’d taken eight pills at the same time, the most A had taken had been three or four.

And now she’d doubled that without even thinking twice about it. That was probably bad, the way she was feeling certainly supported that theory, but A didn’t really care at the moment. She hurt too much, and she was tired, and she really wanted more pills.

So, deciding to ignore whatever the hell had just happened, A picked up the pill bottle and shook out one of the pills, deciding to stick to the absolute minimum for at least the rest of the day, and quickly popped it into her mouth, swallowing it dry. A knew it would take a few minutes to take into effect, but she felt better the moment it was past her throat. She didn’t know why, and she didn’t give a damn either. As long as it made her feel better, she didn’t care how the pills worked.

She drank some more water, stumbled over to her bed, and went to sleep.

* * *

 

The pill-taking kind of escalated after that.

Within a couple of weeks, A had gone up from two pills thrice a day to nearly four pills five times a day - it worked wonders for all her aches and pains, far better than two pills did anyway. She barely felt her leg anymore, let alone her arm and shoulder.

It was great.

It also made A wonder why she hadn’t escalated her pill intake earlier, because this was the least pain she’d been in for as long as she could remember. The high was great too. She felt floaty and warm and glowy all the time, and it was fantastic.

Granted, she spent most of her free time staring at walls without blinking, and the glitches in her brain when she lost hours without knowing what had happened or floated outside her body and felt the world wasn’t real happened more and more often, but at least the pain was gone.

A was quite glad to lose reality if it meant not being in pain anymore.

* * *

 

So, apparently, having Blue around was really good for her health.

Most of the time nowadays A was too stoned to notice much anymore, but she definitely took note when a flying menace came at her with the intent to kill.

Again.

Luckily, she had her spear on hand at the time, and she’d been ready to defend herself - or, at least, as ready as a disabled, very stoned little girl could be.

Even more luckily, she did not have to defend herself.

Because apparently, the raptor she’d been feeding took offense to her being attacked. The flying menace lost a wing soon after. It’s throat went next.

A was frozen, wanting desperately to look away from the gory sight before her, and somehow unable to. It was nauseating. She struggled not to retch as she watched Blue tear into the dead menace’s belly, dripping entrails hitting the ground with a wet splat, a puddle of blood quickly expanding underneath and around the dead menace. It was probably the most gruesome sight A had ever seen. One that was probably going to give her nightmares for ages.

Finally, she managed to tear her eyes away from the sight, quickly turning and stumbling a few steps away.

There was an inquisitive warble from Blue, and A found it in herself to give the raptor an ‘I’m fine’ kind of wave, which Blue seemed to understand. Turning back to her kill, Blue continued to rip into it.

A gagged a little, quickly stumbling off, back to her hotel suite. She needed pills, and then she needed to lie down for a bit and do her best to forget the images seared into her retinas.

Well, at least she hadn’t died today. That was something, right? And, thanks to Blue, there was one less flying menace on the island to terrorize her. That was something too.

And if A felt inordinately gleeful about the death of the flying menace, no matter how gory, well, no one was around to say anything about it anyway.

* * *

 

She needed a haircut.

A didn’t often look in the mirror, because she didn’t really see the use of staring at herself, but she happened to catch a glimpse when she stepped out of the shower, and damn, she really needed to cut her hair.

She couldn’t remember ever cutting it before, and it came down to her lower back - the annoyance of washing and brushing it had grated at her for a while, but the visual hammered it home.

It had to go.

A had never cut hair before. But, like so many things, it was something she could improvise at. She found herself a sturdy pair of scissors, gathered her hair in a low ponytail, chose a spot that said her hair would be a nice length, and proceeded to cut off her ponytail, taking off a large chunk of her hair.

When she released the remains from her ponytail, she came to the conclusion that cutting her hair wasn’t that hard. Where it had reached her lower back, five minutes ago, it now touched the point where her neck met her shoulders - a much more manageable length, and it even looked pretty decent on her, if she had to say so herself.

Granted, it wasn’t completely level, and it hadn’t been done very neatly, but it was a decent first attempt all around.

A tossed the cut hair into the trash, dumped her scissors into the bathroom sink, and went to dress. She wanted some breakfast.

* * *

 

A still wasn’t used to how heavy her body felt after she lost time.

She was pretty sure she’d been out of it for hours, because the last thing she remembered was looking out of the window just after getting out of bed and sitting down in her comfortable chair for breakfast, and now the sun was already past the middle of the sky.

She stared at the wall blankly, the sound of each pull of breath in her lungs and each beat of her heart oddly loud in the silence of her suite, not quite able to find the motivation needed to move. It was like she’d been paralyzed from the neck down, she felt so heavy and numb, like she’d been disconnected from her body and it hadn’t quite been fixed right.

Things that weren’t fixed right never quite worked like they should - A knew that, she’d fixed plenty of things since she’d woken up under the rubble, her own body included.

After long minutes, she manages to make herself move, if far more slowly than usual. She looked down at her breakfast first, the usual tin of fruit, pears this time, canned bread and condensed milk. She hadn’t taken a single bite of it, but she wasn’t hungry, despite it already being past lunchtime. Or maybe she was and she was just too disconnected to feel it. A didn’t know, and right now, she couldn’t bring herself to care either.

Instead, she stared at the can of condensed milk, wondering what it was that made it so delicious, but her thoughts came like they were swimming in molasses, slow to arrive and even slower to make sense. Too slow to really keep A distracted for long.

Slowly, she returned her gaze to the wall.

Time slipped away from her again, but A was already too far gone to notice.

* * *

 

Blue, apparently, was even more intelligent than A had given her credit for. Intelligent enough to find a way through the barrier A had built in the lobby, and to search out A’s suite, probably by scent.

To say A was surprised to wake up with a raptor slinking around her suite was an understatement to say the least. She hadn’t known raptors could climb stairs. Or open doors. Because she was pretty sure she’d closed the door of her suite before she’d gone to bed.

Oh well.

Blue hadn’t slaughtered her in her sleep, nor did the raptor seem inclined to do so now, so A supposed she didn’t really have a problem with a visitor every now and then.

* * *

 

She was losing weight. And with her weight, her health went downhill too.

A had long expected this, to be completely honest - cartoons were pretty much her only insight into the real world, but when one ignored the stunts the heroes pulled, she had gathered that a girl of her age (she guessed it was young, maybe under thirteen, because she looked like the kids in the cartoons, and not like the teens and adults) should not be living the way she did.

It took a toll on her body, and it was slowly but surely wearing her down.

She’d caught a bug that lasted a week and had her bedridden for most of it, and that alone had her back to being able to count her ribs, simply because she’d been too weak to wrestle into her braces and hobble over to her pantry room to get food. When the bug was finally gone, her health hadn’t improved like it should.

She was weak and exhausted, and even when the days passed and she ate and drank regularly and got plenty of rest, she tired too easily and slept too much.

The biggest downside of her waning health and steadily declining weight, though, was the fact that her tolerance for the heavy pills took a downturn too. Which meant that, when she didn’t dial down her intake, she passed out all over the place. But when she took fewer pills, the pain returned, and that left A with a dilemma.

In the end, though, she decided she hated the pain more than she hated passing out, so she continued taking four pills five times a day, and just structured her day around her involuntary naps instead. It wasn’t like she had much to do nowadays. Blue was still getting all the food she needed from the corpse of the big swimming one, which A had secured close to the stage at the aquatheater so it wouldn’t float off a while ago, so A didn’t have to go out to feed the raptor.

She did make it a point to visit Blue daily or at least bi-daily, to make sure the raptor would remember her and protect her, but beyond that and a food trip every so often, A had no real pressing things to do. She did some chores around the suite once every week or so and opened cans for her meals three times a day, but that was about it, to be honest.

Most of her time was spent either in bed, staring at the ceiling or walls mindlessly, or in her comfortable chair as she watched tv, played with her toys, or stared at the ceiling or walls mindlessly.

She did a lot of mindless staring nowadays. Mainly because she often couldn’t find the will to do anything. It was different from when she lost time. When she lost time, she lost memories too, and in these instances, she didn’t lose any memories. She was just so… she wasn’t sure how to call it besides ‘numb’. She was numb, and sometimes it made everything feel so heavy and hard she couldn’t do anything but sit there and do nothing for hours on end.

That probably also contributed to her weight loss; she missed more and more meals nowadays. The hunger that gnawed at her belly often didn’t register until somewhere around dinnertime, and then she ate so much she made herself nauseous, only to puke it all up again a while later. All she could really keep down nowadays was condensed milk, and even that came right back up on occasion. It was starting to become a habit that was surprisingly hard to kick.

Not that A had tried all that hard, to be honest. She just didn’t care that much. As long as she didn’t puke up her pills, it didn’t really matter to her.

* * *

 

Blue snuffled curiously at the can of condensed milk A had been nursing for the better part of two hours.

She’d decided, for the sake of her failing health, to spend some time out in the fresh air and sunshine, and had thus dragged a chair from a random hotel room other than her own outside to sit in. Add a bottle of pop, an extra pill and a can of condensed milk, and she was pretty much content.

That Blue was around to tear any stray flying menaces apart even made it safe for her to be outside, which made it a lot less stressful than it could have been.

Her pet raptor was currently occupied with investigating A’s milk, and she was content to let the dinosaur investigate all she wanted, because as much as she adored condensed milk, she doubted she was going to finish the can. She’d only had a few sips before her stomach had started to get upset, so she had to be very careful with eating anything at all at the moment if she didn’t want to end up puking again.

A was snapped from her light doze when she felt curiously warm scales against her hand, and she cracked her eyes open to see that scent apparently wasn’t enough, because Blue was now nosing at the can in an attempt to get at the contents. Feeling secure in the knowledge that the raptor hadn’t yet harmed her, and that they had built a rather strong bond since the raptor had first showed up at the resort, as well as the fact that A had touched Blue before, A dared put her hand on Blue’s jaw, gently pulling until the raptor opened her mouth, and then she carefully poured some of the condensed milk between those steak knives masquerading as teeth.

Blue was iminently capable of expressing a surprising range of emotions, and the air of surprise, affront and ‘yuck’ the raptor gave off upon getting a taste of the milk had A sniggering in her seat.

Feeling a little bad, A reached beside her for one of the other cans she’d taken outside with her - these had been meant as a treat for Blue anyway. They were cans of cooked ham, which she probably wasn’t going to eat herself anyway, so she didn’t mind feeding them to her pet dinosaur. Placing her can of condensed milk aside, A pulled one of the cans open, shaking the hunk of meat out and into her hand and holding it out for Blue.

The scent of meat instantly captured the raptor’s attention, yellow eyes fixing on it with intensity. Gently, the dinosaur moved her head forward and grasped the meat between her teeth, the tip of her snout touching A’s wrist but her teeth a safe distance from A’s skin. A had hand-fed Blue before, and the raptor had never bitten her hand instead of the meat offered.

She’d stopped being scared of the dinosaur a long, long time ago.

A was halfway through feeding Blue the third can of ham out of seven when a small, high-pitched buzzing noise caught her attention.

The hits to her head had messed up her sight, but they hadn’t affected her hearing at all, and the noise was so unusual that it was hard to miss. Blue heard it too, because she snapped back the chunk of ham and proceeded to search for the source of the noise as well. Predictably, Blue was also the first to find it. The raptor’s attention was fixed on something behind A, and she twisted in her chair to get a look as well.

It turned out to be a little flying machine thingy, which slowly zoomed around A’s chair until it was in front of her, and she could clearly see the lens of a camera. She’d spent enough time in the control room to know what a camera lens looked like, and this flying thingy definitely had one. That meant someone was probably on the other side.

Which, in turn, meant that there were now people who knew A existed.

The thought was mind-boggling. A had spent so long on her own, with little to no memory or concept of other people, that she’d completely forgotten there was a world outside of her island. That there were living beings other than herself and Blue and the flying menaces and the other things that roamed this island.

A stared at the flying thingy, speechless and shocked to the core, and then started mourning for the relatively peaceful existence she’d had until about five minutes ago.

She was pretty sure this meant people would be coming, and she wasn’t sure if she liked that thought. Her life was far from perfect, admittedly, but it was all she knew, and she didn’t want it to change.

Blue eagerly nosed at her hand, having lost interest in the flying thingy, in search for more ham.

Because A had absolutely no clue what else to do and didn’t want to think about it either, she opened the fourth can of ham and continued to feed her pet dinosaur treats, carefully ignoring the flying thingy hovering a few feet away. She was not going to deal with this right now. She just wasn’t. What would come, would come, and when it did, she would have her spear ready.

Just in case.

* * *

 

Two days later, people arrived.

They didn’t give A much of a choice in leaving. They even made her leave Blue behind.

At least she did get to take her crate and her mixing bowl and her toys - A wasn’t sure what she would do if she had to leave behind her beloved possessions. And her pills, though the people didn’t know she had those. She’d wrapped them in a towel she especially liked to make sure she wouldn’t lose them if the caps happened to pop off the bottles, unintentionally hiding them in the process.

As the people guided her into a giant metal bird she was pretty sure was called a helicopter (her cartoons called things like these helicopters), A came to the conclusion that she really didn’t like people.


End file.
